What are the disadvantages of Holafly?

Holafly is still the eSIM we reach for as a family, but no eSIM is the right fit for every trip. After using Holafly in 19 countries as of August 2026 with our three daughters, we've run into a handful of real limitations. Here are the ones worth knowing before you buy, kept to the drawbacks rather than the full picture.

No calls or texts on a destination eSIM

The biggest one to understand up front: a Holafly destination eSIM is data-only. There is no dialer, no SMS inbox, and no local number attached to it. Everything voice or text has to run over data through WhatsApp, FaceTime, or similar. The one exception is the Unlimited Plan, which adds a US, UK, or Canada number that receives texts only, so it still will not place a normal call or send an SMS.

This bites in specific moments. A guesthouse in rural Japan that confirms bookings by phone rather than email, a delivery driver in Da Nang trying to call about a drop-off, a bank that insists on sending a one-time code to a real number. We handle it by keeping our home carrier line switched on for calls and texts alongside the Holafly data, but that means paying two providers and remembering which line does what.

Hotspot limits change from country to country

Holafly sells the plans as unlimited, and for data on your own phone that holds up. Tethering is where it gets uneven. The hotspot allowance is not the same everywhere, so a plan that shares freely to a laptop in one country can be much tighter in the next. If you work off a laptop over your phone's hotspot, that inconsistency is hard to plan around.

We have been caught out by this more than once, assuming we could run a work call off a tethered laptop and finding the hotspot far more limited than the phone data. If tethering matters to your trip, check the hotspot terms for each specific destination before you rely on it.

Fair use can slow you down

Unlimited comes with a fair use policy, and Holafly is not especially specific about where the line sits. In normal use we rarely notice it. During our longer stays, like the months we spent based in Da Nang, there were high-usage days where speeds clearly dropped for a while before recovering. It is not a hard cap you hit and lose service, but it is a reason not to treat the plan as a truly bottomless home-internet replacement.

Coverage depends on the local partner network

Your Holafly data rides on a partner carrier in each country, and you do not get to pick which one. Most of the time that network is fine. In weaker spots it is whatever that partner covers, which is not always the strongest option locally. Deep in the forest outside Rovaniemi in Lapland, or in some rural stretches, we have watched data thin out where a local SIM on a different network might have held on. In cities we almost never think about it.

It is more than light users need

If you spend most of your day on hotel or cafe WiFi and only want a bit of data for maps and the occasional message, an unlimited plan is more than the trip calls for. For that style of travel a small fixed-data eSIM from another provider can come out cheaper. Holafly earns its keep when you are genuinely leaning on mobile data all day, not when you are topping up between WiFi.

Buying one eSIM per country adds up

The per-destination model is simple for a single country, but it gets fiddly and pricey on a fast multi-country trip. Our winter loop through seven European countries would have meant juggling a separate purchase and activation for several of them if we had bought destination eSIMs one at a time. There is a Plans subscription that covers many countries on one eSIM to solve exactly this, but if you stick to per-destination eSIMs, a border-heavy itinerary is where the cost and the admin pile up.

Regional plans have coverage gaps

The regional eSIMs help with the problem above, but they do not cover a whole continent gap-free. The Europe plan covers most of the EU, for instance, yet there are countries a traveler can easily cross into that fall outside it. On a trip that dips in and out of non-EU stops, that gap can leave you without data right when you cross a border. Read the covered-country list for the exact regional plan before you count on it for the whole route.

It is eSIM only, on one device

Holafly is eSIM only, with no physical SIM option. Your phone has to support eSIM, which rules out older or budget handsets and some region-locked models. It also lives on the one device you installed it on, so you cannot pop it into a spare phone or hand it to one of the kids' older tablets the way you can with a plastic SIM. For most recent phones this is a non-issue, but it is worth checking your device before you buy.

Support is chat based

Support runs through chat and WhatsApp rather than a phone line. The team has been responsive for us, but there is an obvious catch: if the thing that is broken is your data, you are trying to troubleshoot the connection over the same connection that is down. In practice that means falling back on hotel or cafe WiFi to reach them, which is fine once you know to expect it.

The verdict

None of this has moved us off Holafly as our main eSIM. For our travel, the unlimited data and the install-before-you-fly simplicity outweigh the trade-offs above. The point of listing them is to set honest expectations, so the plan matches how you actually travel rather than how the marketing reads. If you want the other side of the ledger, including the speeds, hotspot rules, and pricing in detail, our full Holafly review covers why we still choose them.