No matter how cheap you could make a week or two away in the sun, staying connected was a sticking point for years with travellers relying on expensive local SIMs or pricy roaming charges.
But access to local networks has been hugely democratized in recent years, and Saily is one of the companies pioneering travel eSIMs.
But despite strong availability of travel eSIMs today, Saily has noticed that not all consumers can access them equally (or have the confidence to do so), leaving many still vulnerable to high charges.
Questions about whether a particular phone even supports eSIMs and whether roaming has been disabled on their primary SIM or whether they’ll still incur travel charges continue to create uncertainty and prevent people from adopting the technology altogether.
According to the company, a Nord Security spinoff, customers also leave it until the very last minute to sort out a connection, be it after a long flight or when they’re trying to navigate a city and realize they’ve been left without a connection.
eSIMs are the start – a smooth end-to-end experience is what’s next
Fewer than one-third of Saily’s customers have previously used an eSIM, highlighting the novelty of the challenge.
Now that Saily has solved the problem with the underlying technology, it’s now set on making it easier for consumers to connect to travel networks by removing friction, and it could even use AI to help verify device settings are configured correctly.
The company is even looking at making Saily a one-stop shop for other travel perks, like airport lounge access, a VPN-like virtual location changer and an ad-blocker that’s marketed as saving up to 28.6% of a user’s data by preventing unnecessary downloads from happening in the first place.
I caught up with Matas Čenys, Head of Product at Saily, to hear about how Nord Security is set on streamlining travel for consumers and to discuss the challenges that lie ahead.
- Is Saily planning to have an AI agent to help with onboarding of potential customers, baked in your app?
Our goal is simple — to make Saily effortless to set up, intuitive to use, and useful for every trip. We are always on the lookout for different solutions we can implement, and some of these ideas may include AI.
For example, we could use AI to verify your eSIM settings and suggest fixes to ensure you're connected. We'll see.
- What are the most common pain points your users (or indeed any eSIM user) face?
Right now, the main pain point is the fact that flow still isn’t entirely seamless. For example, to turn on an eSIM line and start using data, you still have to go into the settings and flip the switch yourself.
As a result, users wonder whether they’ve correctly set up the line and worry that they’ll get billed for roaming. These things can happen, and we see them popping up in the headlines now and then, so it’s understandable.
So our team is focusing on two things — which steps can we automate for the user, and if we can't, how we can guide the user to make the decision for themselves. It's really all about educating our users so that they are informed about the decisions that have to be made.
- Your data shows that less than 30% of Saily’s user base have used a travel eSIM before. What are the challenges of designing something so vital for an audience with no prior experience?
The most important challenge lies in making sure that “eSIM” is not just some magic word for our future users. For earlier adopters, it might seem that everyone already knows what an eSIM is — which is not the case.
eSIMs have outgrown their original position as a niche travel/tech product, but they still have a long way to go to be considered a mainstream piece of tech.
We want users to understand that eSIMs are a convenient technology that can be used by everyone. You most probably already have a device that supports it. We use all of our marketing channels to explain the use cases and spread the message about travel eSIMs.
When a person with limited prior eSIM experience opens up the app, we want it to be smooth sailing. We also understand that at that moment, that person is most probably abroad, looking for a taxi and how to reach their hotel. They are most likely tired and in a rush.
So we have to make eSIMs as simple as possible. We automate as much as we can. However, we’re working within the boundaries of the OS of the user’s phone.
The user must leave the app to change a few settings, and the challenge lies in guiding the user through the process. We employ visuals and break down the process to make it easier.
Where we cannot automate, we find a solution by offering support and becoming guides. Instead of having a user read a 10-page manual, though, we offer bite-sized pieces of information that take the user to the next step.
The final notification that you’re online — or not — seals the deal. The user can go and enjoy their trip rather than thinking about their data, which should not be an issue in this day and age to begin with.
With this approach, we’ve managed to cut the onboarding time in half for the user groups that used to take the longest.
- What does Saily have in the pipeline for the rest of 2026 and beyond and how do you see the global eSIM market evolving over the next 12 months
We’re building Saily into a travel companion with more features and add-ons to make travel a smoother experience. It takes a lot of hands, so we’re hiring like crazy and are always on the lookout for ways to pick up the pace even more.
We’re fortunate enough to not be short on ideas, so the goal now is to have the capacity to turn them into reality — both those that come from the team and those that come from our customers. So we’re building in a few directions at once.
Onboarding will continue to be one of our focus areas, but we will also focus on increasing our offerings — with big introductions like phone numbers as well as additional perks in airports that our customers are looking for. Many more ideas are in the works, so stay tuned!
- When do you think the physical SIMs will die out for mainstream smartphones? 2030? 2035?
While I could say that it will happen by 2030, the reality is that adoption is still slower than I'd like. For example, not all Android devices support eSIMs yet.
There is still also a lack of budget-friendly smartphones with support for eSIMs. While the situation is improving, I think physical SIMs are here to stay for a little while longer but with a much lower focus and importance.
One of the tweaks you have done in your onboarding is “verifying their plan actually works when they land”. How would they do that without incurring any roaming charges?
It's as simple as guiding the user to turn on the eSIM right after landing. We make sure the user sees the status update inside our app as soon as the connection goes live for the eSIM.
Because setup is performed in advance, the user doesn’t deal with roaming charges. By showing that the eSIM is connected and ready to go inside the Saily app (even if the user is not yet browsing online), we’re giving our customers peace of mind.
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