Free EU roaming quietly died after Brexit, and most of the big UK networks now charge you daily for something that used to cost nothing. It's the piece of travel kit nobody packs deliberately: the phone in your pocket, configured wrong, billing you £2.50 every morning you're abroad.

The £35 fortnight nobody budgets for

EE, Vodafone and Three all reintroduced European roaming charges after Brexit, and at the time of writing the daily passes sit in the £2–£2.60 a day range, triggered on any day you use data. The maths is grim in its smallness: a fortnight in Spain is £30–36 per person, a family of four with four phones is comfortably north of £120 — roughly the price of one of the flights. Multi-day passes trim it slightly, but the shape of the deal is the same.

And because it's billed quietly against your account rather than paid at a till, it's the rare holiday cost that never gets weighed. It should be. It's also the easiest one on the whole trip to delete.

The networks that never brought charges back

The simplest fix isn't a travel product at all — it's being on the right network before you leave:

  • O2 still includes EU roaming on standard plans, with a fair-use cap around 25GB.
  • iD Mobile includes EU roaming with one of the more generous caps, around 30GB.
  • Smarty (which runs on Three's network, without Three's roaming charges) lets you use your allowance in the EU up to a fair-use limit of about 12GB.
  • Lebara includes EU roaming on most of its plans.
  • Giffgaff allows EU roaming from your allowance up to a 5GB fair-use cap — fine for maps and messages, tight for a month away.

Caps and terms move, so check the current fair-use policy before you fly rather than taking a 2026 article's word for it. But the strategic point holds: if you leave the country even twice a year, a £7–10-a-month SIM from this list beats every workaround below, and beats it at home too — Smarty and Lebara are among the cheapest SIM-only deals in Britain regardless of travel.

The eSIM: a fiver of data instead of £35 of roaming

If you're staying put on EE, Vodafone or Three, the answer is an eSIM — a second, digital SIM you install before you travel, from providers like Airalo or Nomad. Rough money: a single-country eSIM runs about £4–8 for 5GB, and Europe-wide bundles cover multi-country trips for £15–25. Any phone from the last five or six years supports it.

The setup that works:

  • Buy and install the eSIM at home on Wi-Fi, not in arrivals on your last bar of signal.
  • Keep your UK SIM active but with data roaming off — you still receive calls and the texts your bank insists on sending.
  • Set the eSIM as your data line. That's the whole trick.

The catch is that most travel eSIMs are data-only: no UK number for outgoing calls. In practice this costs you nothing, because WhatsApp carries the calls and Wi-Fi calling covers the rest — but it's worth knowing before you try to ring a restaurant the old-fashioned way.

For stays of a month or more, the old-school move still wins: a local prepaid SIM bought in-country. A Spanish or Portuguese supermarket SIM buys 20–40GB for £10–15 a month, comfortably beating any travel eSIM per gigabyte. The trade-off is faff — a shop visit, sometimes a passport check — which is why the eSIM took over for anything shorter than a fortnight.

The free layer underneath

Whichever route you take, a chunk of holiday phone use shouldn't cost data at all:

  • Offline maps — download the Google Maps area (or use Organic Maps) before the ferry. Navigation is the single biggest silent data drain abroad.
  • Download the entertainment at home — playlists, podcasts, the Netflix queue. Streaming a boxset on holiday data is how fair-use caps die.
  • Boarding passes and bookings — screenshot them. Airport Wi-Fi has let more people down than any airline.
  • Café and accommodation Wi-Fi for the heavy lifting — photo backups, the doom-scrolling, the video call home.

One genuine warning: banking apps sometimes want a live connection on your real number for verification. Keeping the UK SIM active (just with data off) covers this; removing it entirely does not.

The five-minute audit before any trip

Check what your network charges in your destination — it's on their site, and it changes. If it's daily-charge territory: install an eSIM. If you travel often: move to a network that never joined the roaming revival. And check the phone itself is unlocked and eSIM-capable, which takes one settings menu and thirty seconds.

That's the entire cost of dodging £30-odd per person, per trip, forever. Your phone works exactly the same in Faro as it does in Falkirk — only the bill needs telling.