How much data do you need on a trip
What each activity costs per hour, ready made answers by trip length, and ways to spend less. Size your plan in a minute.
Gigabytes in an eSIM plan mean nothing on their own. Whether 5 GB is a lot depends entirely on what you spend it on. Here is what an hour of each activity costs, and a quick way to size your own plan.
What an hour costs
| Activity | Data per hour |
|---|---|
| Maps and navigation | 5 MB |
| Messaging | 10 MB |
| Email and browsing | 30 MB |
| Social feed with photos | 100 MB |
| Music on the go | 80 MB |
| Short videos in a feed | 500 MB |
| High quality video | 1.5 GB |
| Video call | 400 MB |
These are averages, but the orders of magnitude hold: maps and messaging barely register, while video burns through data hundreds of times faster.
Size your own plan
A normal tourist day looks like this: a couple of hours of maps around town, messaging, a few passes through a social feed, one video call home, some music in transit. That is about 300 MB a day.
Working from the road adds email, calls and browsing, which brings you to roughly 700 MB a day. Watching a series in the evening adds about a gigabyte per evening on top.
Ready made answers
- A weekend, 2 to 3 days. 1 GB is enough if you mostly navigate and message.
- A week of holiday. 3 GB is a calm minimum, 5 GB leaves room for feeds and video calls.
- Two weeks. 10 GB covers a normal holiday without rationing.
- A month, or working while travelling. 20 GB and up, or an unlimited plan.
- If you stream video and tether a laptop. Take unlimited and stop counting.
How to spend less
- Download offline maps before you fly: navigation then costs you nothing at all.
- Turn off auto download of photos and videos in messengers, it is the quietest leak there is.
- Load music and shows at home over Wi-Fi.
- Check that phone backups run on Wi-Fi only, or a single backup will eat the whole plan.
If you guess wrong
It is not a problem: you top up the same eSIM without reinstalling anything. The new data and days add to what is left. So it is better to take a smaller plan and add to it than to pay for gigabytes you never use.
