Travel guide

eSIM Just Beat Roaming in Israel. Why Most Travelers Still Skip It

Noa Regev9 min read

eSIM just overtook carrier roaming as the most common way Israelis get data abroad, according to a new Kantar Institute study. 38.4% of Israeli travelers now buy an eSIM plan, versus 34.0% who buy a roaming package from Pelephone, Cellcom, or Partner. That's a real shift, and it happened for the first time. But flip the number around and a different story shows up: 61.6% of Israeli travelers still aren't using eSIM. Local SIM cards and Wi-Fi-only trips fill most of the rest. If eSIM plans are cheaper and easier to set up, as the marketing for nearly every provider claims, that's a strange number to still be sitting at.

The usual explanation is price. It's the wrong one. The data itself points somewhere else, and so does what holdout travelers actually say when you ask them directly.

Key Takeaways

• eSIM (38.4%) passed carrier roaming (34.0%) among Israeli travelers for the first time, per a Kantar Institute study of 510 Israelis commissioned by a competing eSIM provider.
• The generational gap in eSIM adoption is far bigger than any plausible price gap: 15.6% of 66-74-year-old travelers use eSIM versus 42.2% who stick with carrier roaming, while 18-29-year-olds lean the other way (35% eSIM vs. 23.9% carrier).
• That pattern fits risk tolerance, not budget. Older, less price-sensitive travelers stick with the option that requires no new setup and no "did this work?" moment before a flight.
• The three moves that actually lower that risk, in order of impact: install the eSIM before departure, keep the carrier SIM active as backup, and show real switcher accounts instead of generic reviews.
• Price comparisons and ads don't move this group, because price was never what was holding them back.

What the New Data Actually Shows

The Kantar Institute study covers a representative sample of 510 Jewish Israelis aged 18-74. It found that 71% of respondents had flown abroad at least once in the past five years, and among those travelers, 38.4% bought an eSIM package, ahead of the 34.0% who bought a roaming package from an Israeli carrier, for the first time on record. Another 24.9% bought a local SIM at their destination, and 20.8% skipped a data package entirely and relied on Wi-Fi (Israel Hayom, July 30, 2026; independently reported the same day by The Jerusalem Post).

Worth flagging up front: the study was commissioned by a competing eSIM provider in the same market this post is written for. The underlying fieldwork came from Kantar, an independent research institute. Still, a competitor's involvement in the commission is exactly the kind of detail that should stay attached to the numbers, not get quietly dropped.

Those four figures also add up to more than 100%, which the coverage doesn't fully explain. The most likely reason: the questions covered travel behavior across five years, not one specific trip. A traveler who flew more than once could reasonably land in more than one category over that period. Worth keeping in mind when reading the percentages below as a snapshot of habits, not a single clean split of one trip's decision.

That eSIM edged past roaming at all is a genuine milestone. It's also easy to misread. A 4.4-point lead isn't a landslide, and it says nothing about why most travelers are still choosing something other than eSIM. To understand that, the generational breakdown in the same study is more useful than the topline number.

For a wider frame: GSMA Intelligence, the mobile industry's research arm, forecasts eSIM smartphone connections climbing from roughly 850 million globally in 2025 to 6.7 billion by 2030 — about 76% of all smartphone connections (GSMA Intelligence, eSIM market progress report). Israel's shift isn't an isolated blip; it's an early, visible slice of a much larger curve.

The Excuse Everyone Gives Is Price. The Data Says Otherwise

If cost were the deciding factor, eSIM adoption should track roughly evenly across age groups, since the same plans are available to every traveler regardless of age. The study shows the opposite: a sharp, consistent generational split, and it reverses direction twice.

eSIM vs. Carrier Roaming Adoption by Age Group

Source: Israel Hayom, July 30, 2026, citing the Kantar Institute study commissioned by a competing eSIM provider.

Younger travelers lean toward eSIM by double digits. Older travelers lean toward carrier roaming by an even wider margin, and the gap only widens with age. That's not what a pure price effect looks like — the same eSIM plans and the same carrier rates are available to every age group.

Education shows a similar tilt: 67.1% of eSIM buyers in the study hold higher education, and women make up 57.4% of eSIM buyers versus 42.6% men. None of that lines up with a story about who can or can't afford a cheaper plan. It lines up with a story about who is more comfortable trying something new immediately before a trip, and who isn't.

This lines up with what we hear informally, not as data but as a recurring pattern, in setup conversations with long-time carrier customers weighing a switch. Price is rarely what comes up first. Someone who has used the same carrier's roaming pack for a decade will often say, unprompted, that they'd happily pay more for the version that guarantees no surprises. The concern was never the extra few dollars. It was not knowing, right before a flight, whether the unfamiliar option would actually work.

Carrier Roaming Is the Known Devil

Carrier roaming has one property eSIM can't currently match: it requires nothing new. No app to download, no QR code to scan, no menu to hunt through, no moment of wondering whether the install actually worked. You land, your phone connects, exactly like it always has. That reliability is inherited, not earned in the moment. It feels the same either way.

Switching to an eSIM asks a traveler to do something unfamiliar at the worst possible time to discover it doesn't work: the day before, or the day of, a flight. There is no room in that moment for troubleshooting a settings menu. Even travelers who know intellectually that eSIM is cheaper will default to the option that asks nothing of them. The cost of being wrong about the roaming pack is a bigger bill. The cost of being wrong about the eSIM, in their mind, is landing without a working phone.

That is a risk-perception problem, not a cost problem, and it explains the generational split better than anything else in the data: older travelers, who are statistically more likely to have used the same carrier setup for years without incident, have the most "known devil" to lose by switching.

What Actually Lowers That Risk

Three things move the needle here, and they're ordered by how directly each one removes a specific moment of doubt.

1. Install the eSIM before departure, not at the airport. This removes the single highest-stakes moment in the entire decision: landing in a new country and not knowing whether the data connection will work. An eSIM installed and tested at home, days before a flight, turns "will this work when I land" into a question that's already been answered.
2. Keep the carrier SIM active as backup while the eSIM handles data. A traveler doesn't have to bet everything on the new option working. If the eSIM has an issue, the carrier line is still there for calls, texts, or emergency data. Lowering the stakes of trying something new is often what gets someone to try it at all.
3. Show real, specific switcher stories over generic star ratings. A four-star average tells a skeptical holdout nothing about their specific worry. A named traveler describing exactly what they checked, when they installed it, and what happened when they landed answers the actual question in their head. Proof beats claims, and specific proof beats generic proof.

Why Ads and Price Comparisons Won't Move This Group

Most eSIM marketing, including a fair amount of it in Israel right now, is built around price: cheaper than the carrier, cheaper than the international competitors. That message works on travelers who are already comparing eSIM providers to each other. It does nothing for the 61.6% who haven't decided to use eSIM at all. They were never comparing prices in the first place. A billboard that says "we're 30% cheaper than the market leader" answers a question a carrier-loyal traveler isn't asking.

What moves that group is demonstrated reliability, not a lower number. That's the practical version of a simple idea: trust has to be shown, not claimed. A company can say its eSIM "just works" as many times as it wants. It doesn't reduce anyone's risk perception the way a working pre-flight test does, or a kept backup line, or a specific stranger's honest account of what happened. Spending on things a traveler can verify for themselves, before they ever pay, does more for adoption at this stage than spending on things that just buy attention.

The Real Growth Lever Is the First Try, Not the Price

Most travelers don't shop for a data provider the way they'd shop for a flight or a hotel. They ask someone they already trust, in a group chat or a Facebook travel group, and go with the answer. That's specifically a first-time-decision moment: once a working alternative has been tried and held up, people rarely revisit the choice on their next trip.

That reframes what growth actually depends on here. It isn't winning a price comparison against the next provider. It's reducing the risk of the very first attempt enough that a carrier-loyal traveler is willing to make it at all. Every point above, installing early, keeping a backup, seeing a real switcher story, does exactly that. None of it is about being the cheapest option in the room.

Peace of Mind Is a Checklist, Not a Slogan

"Peace of mind" shows up constantly in eSIM marketing, including from providers who otherwise compete hard on price. It only means something if it's demonstrated rather than declared. In practice, it comes down to a short, verifiable list: install before you fly, keep a backup line active, and look for proof from someone who's already made the switch, not a claim from the company selling it.

That checklist is what actually converts a carrier-loyal traveler, not a lower price tag and not a bigger ad budget. The Kantar numbers show that eSIM has already crossed a real threshold in Israel. Closing the remaining gap depends on removing risk at the moment travelers are deciding whether to trust something unfamiliar, right before they leave.

For travelers ready to try that first install ahead of a trip, our eSIM setup guide walks through activation before departure, and the Android eSIM installation guide and iPhone eSIM installation guide cover the exact steps for each platform.