Travel eSIM Rules: What a Country Does to Your Phone

Where you’re going

Start with the country. The catalogue holds 204 of them, and each one falls into one of three states: mapped, checked, or published. Mapped means we can serve it. Checked means we have run the regulatory probe and know whether a trap exists. Published means a guide is live, sourced and dated.

Eleven countries are checked and carry a confirmed trap, sorted into three kinds of rule. Türkiye is the first with a full guide, last verified against primary sources on 10 August 2026. The Turkey eSIM page covers the packages, the pre-flight checklist, and what to do the moment you land.

Indonesia, Nepal, Georgia, Pakistan and Egypt sit in the same device-registration group as Türkiye. Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates block calls over messaging apps. Thailand and the Philippines cap how many lines one passport can hold. Those eleven are checked, not written — the catalogue says exactly which is which, per country, with no guesswork about the rest.

A regulator blocked roughly 52 eSIM sellers' websites across three decisions between July and September 2025. That block never touched the connection itself. The mechanism and the dated blocklist are on their own page .

Stay past 120 days and a separate device-registration regime can apply. It’s tied to the phone, not the eSIM. A two-week trip never reaches it. The fee and the open question are covered here .

A physical tourist SIM is a different product, bought in person against your passport. That counter process has its own page .

The Airalo review covers what actually breaks once you’re using a plan — installs, refunds, how fast support answers.

Every one of those pages exists for the same reason. A traveller hit the rule first and asked about it after. This site answers in that same order.

What this site is for

Most eSIM sellers open with a rate table. A country’s rules get a footnote, if they get mentioned at all. This site works the other way. It opens with what a country’s regulator, network or ID system actually does to your phone. We check every claim against a primary source and date it on the page. The eSIM package comes second, once you know what applies to your trip.

The traps this site tracks aren’t rare edge cases. A regulator blocks eSIM storefronts. A country caps phone lines per passport. A device-registration clock outlives most trips. A seller’s homepage has no reason to mention any of that. A guide built to route you past it does.

The catalogue lists every country we can serve, and it never pretends a listing is a guide. A flag with no guide behind it says so on the row. Eleven countries are checked for traps; one has a written guide. More join the same way this one did: the rule first, the source dated, the product page after.

How we work

A number carries its date and its source right next to it, not in a footnote. The device-registration fee on the IMEI page, for one example, is cited with the Official Gazette notice that set it. A community report is quoted with a handle, a subreddit and a date. It stays a witness, not a fact this site adopts as its own. Where two sources disagree and there’s no third to settle it, the disagreement gets published. It doesn’t get averaged away or guessed at.

Every regulatory page here says who a rule reaches, first. A rule written for a resident renewing a device registration has nothing to do with someone on a two-week holiday. The page says so up front, instead of leading with the worst case.

Buying a plan through a link here may pay us a commission, or you may end up paying us directly. Either way, that doesn’t change which page you land on first. It doesn’t decide which rule gets reported either. The same test applies to every number on this site, not only the ones about Turkey. The full policy — sourcing, corrections, and how the commercial side works — is here .

Who writes this

An editorial team writes and checks every page on this site. No single byline signs off alone. A named-author page is planned and not live yet, and we’re not putting a name up before there’s a page behind it. Until there is, the editorial policy above is the standing account of how this content gets made and corrected.

Pages carrying a fee or a deadline list their own review date. When a source updates a number, we update the page with it, not on a fixed schedule. When a claim doesn’t hold up, it comes off the page, and the foot of that page names the sources it was last checked against and when.