The best SIM cards for travelling in the UK

England, don’t make that mistake amongst the locals) is a highly popular destination for Australian travellers, whether it’s to spend a holiday or get some serious work done. Staying online with your smartphone can be a key part of making the most of your time when in the UK, but what’s the best approach to doing so?

Ideally you want to save money and have the greatest degree of convenience when doing so. There’s a few key ways to do that depending on your phone, budget and the length of your trip. Here’s our picks for some of the best travel SIMs, travel eSIMs, roaming and local telco deals.

Most travel SIM providers will include the UK almost by default, because it’s one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations hands-down.

However, most travel SIM providers also offer fairly lousy rates for calls, texts and data within the UK, making it tricky to find a real bargain. The growth of eSIM options has only made this trickier, with many providers no longer shipping physical SIMs to Australia, though some local shipping options and resellers such as SIMCorner do still offer this kind of service.

The Three UK offer of 25GB plus unlimited standard calls and texts to standard UK landlines is amongst the better deals you’ll find if you do want to go down the travel SIM route and need a physical SIM to drop into your phone.

Airalo’s eSIM offering for the UK has the rather awkward name of “Uki Mobile”, but that aside it’s an easy to use and generally affordable option, with plans providing between 1GB to 20GB of data an expiry periods between 7 and 30 days – more than long enough to pop down to Buckingham Palace for a spot of tea with the King, if you’re so inclined.

Pricing runs from $US5 to US$36 which certainly isn’t the lowest prices you can pay, but the beauty of using eSIM is that you can configure pretty much everything straight from your phone before you travel, freeing you from the difficulties of sourcing SIM cards, finding your SIM tool, dropping your SIM tool, picking it up and realising that the nano SIM went flying when you stood up to pick up your SIM tool… yeah, we’ve been there.

The catch here – as it always is – is that you must have an unlocked, eSIM-capable handset to use Airalo’s services. Airalo does not offer traditional physical SIM cards. eSIM is far more commonly found in premium priced or at least high mid-range smartphones, so if you’re carrying around an older or unsupported model, this may not be the deal for you.

If you’d rather keep your mobile number to the one SIM – virtual or not – then you’ll need to check whether your telco offers any kind of prepaid or additional roaming service. Plenty will offer PAYG roaming, but that’s typically on pricey per-MB terms that will sap your wallet so rapidly it’ll make your head spin.

Vodafone’s $5/day international roaming includes the UK, and it’s hands-down the easiest way to keep yourself online and calling while you’re roaming through Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England. That $5 per day buys you access to whatever inclusions your plan has, which these days basically means unlimited calls and texts to Australian numbers, plus your base line data inclusion. You don’t get “unlimited” data with speed caps as you would at home, however. Instead, every additional 1GB of data you need will cost you an additional $5 on top.

Here’s a range of suitable Vodafone plans to pair with its $5 international roaming deal:

You should consider how long you plan to roam for, however. $5 per day might not seem like much, but many Australians take longer breaks in the UK, if only because that flight is seriously lengthy and it’s not really worth popping over for the weekend. The longer you stay, the more those $5 charges will add up.

Vodafone isn’t the only player in the roaming space worth considering; here’s a range of telco plans that have international roaming options available at additional cost: