Getting Started with Airalo in 2023 | Full iPhone Tutorial

having mobile data while traveling internationally can make a huge difference when it comes to getting the most out of your trip even if you're a planner like myself things will inevitably come up on an international trip that require the use of a connected smartphone and relying on public Wi-Fi networks is not always going to be your best bet things like getting directions to your hotel or communicating with your Airbnb host to get check-in instructions using various Transportation apps to look up a ride share option or maybe the next available train purchasing online tickets to a show or maybe a museum and really anything else that you would use your smartphone for domestically is that much easier internationally with the use of mobile data now in the past the primary way to do this would be to actually arrive at your destination purchase a physical SIM card there with a mobile data plan on it for that area and then swap it out with your phone's existing SIM card temporarily which you know works it's kind of a hassle especially when you consider you probably just landed in a foreign country that you have never been to before and maybe the signs aren't in English so you're using every last Brain Cell you have trying to figure that out but thankfully there is a much better solution nowadays that is a lot more convenient and available in most modern smartphones and that is an electronic SIM card otherwise known as an esim now I won't bore you with the technical details since I probably couldn't do so accurately even if I tried but essentially what you need to know is that a esim is a digital version of your phone's physical SIM card that's already in the phone when you buy it ready to go rather than needing a physical SIM card to change your phone's mobile data carrier and plan smartphones that are esin compatible have software actually built into them that handle these processes for you completely digitally so effectively all new smartphones being made today are esim compatible if you're an Apple user like myself the iPhone x series and newer has esim compatibility but has to not exclude anybody I will include a link in the description that has all other major phone manual factors and their compatible models I should also probably note that in order for the esim to work in your smartphone it has to be unlocked so I won't go into how to check that today but you can look this up in the settings of your phone you can also call your carrier so Verizon a t and so forth and they'll be able to tell you if your phone's unlocked or not and if your phone is not unlocked they should also be able to help you with the process of unlocking it which shouldn't cost you anything it's usually either something they can do over the phone or they can provide you a link where you can go online and complete the process yourself so last year was my first experience with an e-sim and clearly went very well or else I probably wouldn't be making a video about it Steph and I were bouncing back and forth between countries in Europe for an entire month we were booking plane tickets hotels looking up directions to things looking up menus for restaurants the whole nine and because I anticipate us doing a lot of those same things as we head back to Europe in a few weeks and we're going to be there for a few weeks I'm gonna pre-purchase a plan on an app called aralo today and show you how to purchase the plan on the app how to install the Sim and then some things you should be aware of once you actually get to your destination to make sure that your phone is up and running how it should be all right I am going to jump into the app now and share my screen so you can see what I'm doing [Music] so I got my trusty mobile here I have a Rollo the app in the top left I thought it was air low for the longest time it wasn't until I actually went to their website and they said the name of the app out loud that I started to feel like an idiot that's the app that you're gonna download from the App Store if you're wanting to follow along or purchase an esim so I'm going to go into there open that bad boy up so you can see the top it says hello Brian uh it says that because that is my name anyway at the top we've got local esims Regional e-sims and Global e-sims so local esims is going to be more country specific so you got United States Japan Mexico UK Etc these are going to be for a specific country so you are only going to be able to use the esem and get access to the local towers and networks and mobile data and all that good stuff in that country we're gonna be in like five maybe six countries I'm going to anticipate needing probably a regional e-sim which is what I did last time so the Europe Regional e-sim here we'll get to that in a moment but then there's Global esim and that's for the a whole wide world I don't really know much about that to be honest but I would imagine it's just a general data plan that you could use anywhere in the world I would not use local e-sims if you're going to be moving throughout different countries because there's probably a more convenient option in the regional e-sims I doubt there's a savings if any by purchasing individual countries and having to actually change that over because a lot of the minimum periods are for seven days or it's a gig of data so you might not find that as beneficial as just purchasing a regional e-sim that covers multiple countries that you'll be traveling to that's what I'm going to do I'm going to purchase the Europe one so I'm going to click Europe here I'm in Europe it is showing me my options for plans on each of these plans you have a data limit and then you have a time parameter so really it's whichever one expires first your plans up you have a gig of data in this top plan that you can see here but you also only have seven days to use it which is is probably a pretty good ratio regardless but if you hadn't used your full gig of data at the end of seven days your plan would expire and you would have to purchase more data so we can see this is five US dollars to purchase this plan and you can see two at the top it says under eurolink it says 39 countries so if you click that it will show you the supported countries so this is a good check too if you're not sure if the particular Regional e-sim that you're looking at is going to support all the countries you're going to this can help you make your decision as to if you're going to get a regional e-sim versus maybe just purchasing a single country or two countries or what have you so you can see in this list there's 39 countries so there's quite a lot we're going to be in a handful of these I've already checked I know that it supports all the countries that we're going to so this is going to be the one that I purchase so now it's really just a matter of how much data do I want and and for how long do I want it we're going to be gone for about 21 days last time I was gone for a month I had exactly 30 days that I used to plan for and I think I bought a 10 gigabyte plan I did buy a 10 gigabyte plan and I only used I had only used about five gigs by the end of three weeks so I actually was a little bit more liberal with how much I was using my data towards the end of the trip this time around I'm only gonna buy the five gigabyte plan and then I will I will actually show you there's there's options for adding more as you go if needed so we're just gonna go ahead and buy this five gigabyte plan that is a 30 day plan plenty of time to use the five gigs and I actually don't anticipate us needing more than five gigs I'm gonna hit this buy now button it says twenty dollars and that is the price I'm willing to pay by the way twenty dollars not bad honestly if you think about it so a lot of that information that we just looked at is reiterated here at the top the coverage is 39 countries I'm getting five gigabytes of data that I have 30 days to use then we can see Top-Up packages here so this is once you purchase the plan if throughout using the plan you realize you're running out and you need more data or maybe you need more time because you're staying longer than you anticipated and the plan validity is going to expire based on the amount of time that the original plan allowed you can add more based on these packages here so I could add one gigabyte of data at any point after purchasing the original plan for five dollars and that would be good for seven days I could purchase a three gigabyte plan that would be good for 30 days at 13 and so forth so you can see what they'll offer you here in terms of what you can add after the fact supported countries again you can see the entire list if you click show more here we already checked that out additional information we've got a section that says check available networks this is just going to show the different networks that the e-sim will connect to in all the various countries in that list of 39 countries which is cool but honestly you know I don't really care as long as my phone's connecting I don't really care what network it's on I'm I'm sure it's fine if you want to check that out it's there and there's actually a way once you install the esim that you can choose the network you're connecting to in the settings of your phone but there's an automatic setting that I leave it on where it just does that for you plan type is data only I think that's the majority of what they offer they might offer some plans that have phone support and SMS text messaging support as well I just haven't seen them I don't personally really need that when we're traveling we're usually just looking up how to get places booking hotels and we're communicating with people back in the States via iMessage because they have iPhones as well so that's just using data it's not actually using SMS we can even FaceTime with people back home that uses data doesn't use cell service so we only need data we don't actually need halls or texts or anything so activation policy so this one is really important to pay attention to because this really determines whether or not you can plan ahead and pre-purchase your e-sim for example on this one it says the validity period starts when the e-sim connects to any supported networks essentially what that means is that the plan isn't actually going to start so your timer of days that you have the 30 days isn't going to start counting down and the data isn't going to start being used until you actually get to one of the countries that you're purchasing in an esim for and your phone makes the connection to one of their towers we're flying to London first so I'll turn this esim on once we get there and once my phone can to a tower in the UK then my plan will start my 30 days starts and my five gigabytes will start being used if I'm not on Wi-Fi of course that's nice because I can I can purchase this now and not have to worry about doing it once I get there and not have to worry as well about the esim being used up before I actually get there so that's important to pay attention to there are some I don't know what the exact language is but it does say something along the lines of that your esim validity period starts as soon as you make the purchase so for those ones you are going to probably want to wait until you actually get to where you're going to get on aralo you'll probably have to be on Wi-Fi and then make the purchase there so that you're not wasting days and gigabytes before you get there okay so I'm gonna click show more so we already looked at the network the plan type the activation policy Top-Up option that is uh what we talked about before where you are able to add time and gigabytes to your plan as needed after you make this purchase so refilling essentially another info talking about 5G only on 5G capable devices yada yada okay cool I'm gonna X out of this and I'm going to hit the buy now at the bottom so again eurolink 39 countries data 5 gigabytes validity 30 days price 20 bucks choose payment method so you can pay with a lot of different methods on this platform I've used this platform before so my credit card should be on here so I'm gonna actually just hit change and I'm going to hit the credit debit card and there we go so my safe card is there at the top obviously if you haven't used this yours won't be in there so you'll just have to hit add new card but I'm going to hit select on the right there on my card and then we've got at the bottom apply code or use air money so I actually I used somebody I found somebody online had a referral code for this when you make an account you get a referral code just like with most apps you can get you know rewarded for referring your friends so I'll actually put my referral code in the description of this video if you sign up with my referral code you get a three dollar credit and so do I so yeah might as well do that if you want I'm not affiliated with oralo at all but if it saves you three bucks and adds three bucks to my account it's kind of a win-win so I as well right so if you have a code or you want to use mine punched in there all right so a couple check boxes here this top one's terms and conditions and privacy policy agreeing to that and then this bottom one is essentially just agreeing to the fact that you check to make sure your phone is esim compatible and unlocked all right and then all that's really left to do is complete order here so I'm going to hit complete order it's going to think about whether or not it wants my 20 US Dollars which why wouldn't it you know all right thank you for your order sent a confirmation receipt to my email and I've got an order ID [Music] thank you all right so we have purchased the E Sim and I am back on the home page or the store Page which is the bottom left icon there I can see actually in the top there's that air money it says us one dollar I I believe I got a credit for purchasing the Sim I guess I could use that to top up or put it towards topping up if I need to or just the next time I buy an esim so that's kind of cool like a Rewards program of sorts so to install the esim I am going to click the my e-sims button on the bottom middle here and so this actually this might be a little confusing to look at but the the bottom card there because I have two Euro Link cards the bottom one there is the one from last year so it's just it shows expired the one we're looking at right now is the top one the one that I'm gonna install so I'm actually I'm gonna hit the white details button on that top card I want to point out this little widget of sorts in the middle that says data usage so that's actually a super helpful gauge to use while you're out and about to determine where you're at with your data so I wasn't obsessively checking this while we were out on our our trip last year but I would say at the end of the day or maybe every couple days I'd check and use that as a gauge to determine if you know maybe I'm going to be needing to purchase data in the coming days if you buy a smaller plan like a one gig plan or a three gig plan or whatever this would probably be really helpful for you to use you can just open up the Rallo app it's just in the middle of my e-sims on the same page you can look at this widget and see where you're at with your data so pointing that out also on this page you can buy Top-Up packages so this is where you could add more data if you need to at any point so they have the one gig plan valid for seven days five bucks three gig plan thirteen dollars Thirty Days and so forth so I'm gonna go back up I'm gonna hit install esim and access data so there's three different ways to install the esim the default method is direct which you can see it's got highlighted up here in the top left this is the most straightforward kind of does it for you to be honest the installation process and then you've got QR code and manual so I'm just going to do direct leave the app open make sure you're connected to the internet it's a good connection I won't bore you with reading through all this since you could read through it yourself but I'll just show you what you need to do so we're gonna hit stall esim okay tap continue twice and wait for a while your e Sim will connect to the network we already read about that so I'm gonna hit next choose a label for your new esim plan next choose default lines okay install esim so it said hit continue twice I'll hit continue and hit continue one more time and I'll probably jump forward because I think this does take a few minutes so I will jump forward once it's done all right so cellular setup complete your webbing esim is now active on this iPhone done okay so default line your default line is used to call or send messages to people who are not in your contacts so this is actually and even says down here you can customize this later in settings don't worry about this too much you can change all this later just leave it on primary for now this is just saying you're still going to use your primary cellular service for the time being iMessages and FaceTime I'm still going to use primary because again you can change this later so until I'm actually on the trip I don't want any of this to be the aralo esim quite yet cellular data I am still going to choose primary because again I can change all this later and I'll show you what to do once you get to where you're going so I'm gonna leave it as primary allow cellular data switching I would always leave this off because essentially if you left this on and for some reason you didn't turn off your primary cellular plan from where you're from so for me if I had not turned off my Verizon plan in the states it would automatically which or try to switch to Verizon if the local network that I was trying to tap into had a weak signal and in that case you would be using like for me I would be using Verizon and then they could charge me for using my phone internationally which is kind of defeats the whole purpose of doing this you want to leave that off to prevent any unnecessary charges or use of your primary network from back home then you'll hit continue here alright so now it says your esim has been successfully installed that is all you really have to do in the app for now especially because we're not on our trip or in the other countries quite yet so now I'm going to briefly talk about what you'll do once you get to your destination so I mean for example I'm going to show you what I'll do once I actually get to London I won't actually do it because I'm not there yet but I'll show you hypothetically what you will do it's just a couple clicks alright so we'll open up our Settings app we will scroll down to Cellular and you can see under the Sims category here I have primary and then I've actually already gone in here and renamed this Sim to oralo Europe primary is my Verizon plan here in the United States my phone number is shown beneath there I just blurred it out you can see they're both on which the arala one being on is not a problem because if you remember from when I went to purchase it it says it doesn't start my billing cycle until I actually get to where I'm going and my phone pings one of the towers there so that's fine but I will click the turn on this line I'll I'll toggle that off in a second here but just show a couple things first so cellular plan label you can see I renamed it to aralo Europe I think by default it'll use one of these categories like personal I changed the name so that I know which one I'm toggling on and off when I go and look at my Sims the network selection this will be automatic so you click it shows Automatic by default if you toggle that off when you are for example in London or somewhere you will get the option to maybe connect to a couple of different Towers depending on what the options are there or a couple of different mobile carriers but like I mentioned before I just leave this on automatic because it's just going to pick the one that has the strongest connections there's no need to change that my number you won't get a number because you're not going to get any sort of calling or texting privileges with this data plan so you won't see anything there one of the last things I'll point out on here is data run filming should be on so when you go to enable this e Sim I think by default it's actually toggled off so when you have this on make sure data roaming is also on and then last thing cellular data Network there is instructions on this in the uralo app that APN section should be the only thing that needs to be filled out with data it looks like it's done it for me here which is great but if it doesn't for whatever reason the app will have the instructions on what you need to key in there and you should you can just copy and paste it from their app all right great so I'm going to turn this off for now because I'm not using it and the last thing I'll mention here is when you go and enable your e-sim for when you get to wherever you're going you're going to go ahead and turn this one on this one that says oralo you're up for me for example go ahead and turn off your primary line so it might say primary might say something else for you but go into primary and toggle the turn on this line to off I did this because it gave me peace of mind that my phone is not going to try to connect to my Verizon plan at home and accidentally use any sort of International Day data or calls or texts or anything like that and I won't get any surprise charges from Verizon on my next bill so I turn that off because I don't plan on using texting and calling while I'm gone and I just rely on oralo so again you get to where you're going you come in here to settings you go to Sims you turn off your primary and you turn on your esim alright so that's really it that is the purchasing process the installation process a little bit of how to use the oralo app and then toggling the e-sim on and off as well as your primary line on and off if you have any questions about the urallo app I'm happy to try to answer them to the best of my ability if you leave them in the comments below they also have a really great support section of their website and troubleshooting guides a lot of these are in video format so they're really easy to follow along with and I've personally use them myself although thankfully I haven't had to use them much but they are extremely helpful so I'd recommend checking that out and I'll leave a link for that in the description below again I am not affiliated with the Rollo at all but if you would like to get three dollars off your e-sim purchase I've put my referral Link in the description there's also code in there so if you don't use the link you can just put my code in there at checkout and it should take the three dollars off if you found this video helpful I'd really appreciate if you liked the video and subscribe to the channel I have more videos like this coming out in the future as well as the highlight reels from Steph and I our trips so if you like that kind of content as well there's a lot of that coming I haven't graduated to knowing how to sign off on these videos so good luck planning your trip talk to you later well I won't talk to you but well I'll talk to you but you won't talk to me anyway see ya potato ES [Music]

Channel: Brian & Steph

Views: 52,868

Keywords: brian, hagan, stephanie, vlog, travel, traveler, travelers, traveling couple, couple, tourist, tourists, tourism, explore, exploring, adventure, road trip, travel couple, sightseeing, landmark, steph, brian & steph, brian and steph, 4k, airalo, how to, tutorial, guide, complete, esim, abroad, international, mobile, phone, data, plan, network, carrier, sim card, sim, app, walkthrough, instruction, internet, iphone, ios, text, maps, travel tips, travel hacks, hacks, tips, advice

Id: Pi1Cb1tEeSI

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023