Should You Let Employees Use Travel eSIMs?

A Policy Checklist for Enterprises

For years, international roaming has been painfully simple and painfully expensive. An employee lands in London, their phone lights up with a "Welcome abroad!" text, and suddenly you're paying $10-$15 a day for the privilege of email, maps, and Teams calls.

Travel eSIMs break that model.

With a few taps, a traveler can download a local or regional data plan, often at a fraction of classic roaming rates. That's great for the employee's experience and often great for your P&L but it also blows up a lot of your old assumptions about how roaming is supposed to work.

So the real question for enterprises isn't "what is a travel eSIM?" anymore. It's: should you allow them, encourage them, or try to keep everything on your carrier's roaming plans?

This post walks through the main policy angles to think about, so you can make the call deliberately instead of letting it happen piecemeal.

From "Roaming Days" to "Trip Data"

Most corporate roaming setups are built around daily fees: a fixed charge per day, per line, for access to the home bundle of minutes and data. It's predictable, but not always efficient. Someone who only uses a few hundred megabytes a day pays the same as the power user streaming video in taxis.

Travel eSIMs flip the model. Instead of "$X per day," you're looking at "Y GB for the whole trip." A typical offer might be 5-20 GB valid for 7-30 days in a specific country or region. For many business travelers, who mostly need maps, messages, emails, collaboration apps, and ride-hailing, that's more than enough.

That shift matters for policy. If your current contracts are built around daily roaming passes, travel eSIMs are pressure test: do those passes still make economic sense for your top routes? In some cases they will. In others, they won't even be close.

A good starting point is simple: pick your top three destinations, price a typical trip under your current roaming plan, then price the same trip using a reasonable travel eSIM bundle. You don't need perfect data to spot a 2-3x difference.

Security, Visibility, and MDM/EMM

From a security perspective, eSIMs themselves aren't inherently more dangerous than physical SIMs. The real issue is visibility.

If a corporate device suddenly has a second profile with a different number and data plan, can your MDM/EMM see that? Are you able to tell which traffic is going over which profile? Are there any policies today that address this scenario at all?

Most mobility teams are still in "don't ask, don't tell" territory: they either haven't documented a stance, or they assume employees won't bother with travel eSIMs. That assumption is already aging out, especially among frequent travelers and more tech-savvy employees.

Your policy doesn't need to turn into a 20-page security treatise. It does need to answer a few basics in plain language like:

• Are employees allowed to install a personal or third-party travel eSIM on a corporate device?

• If yes, does it have to come from a short list of approved provders or from the primary carrier only?

• If no, what's the recommended alternative for keeping costs under control (e.g., corporate roaming passes, local SIMs, loaner devices)?

Even if the answer is "we're still evaluating, please talk to IT before using a travel eSIM," it's better than silence.

Who Pays, and How?

The finance side tends to lag the technology curve. If you allow travel eSIMs but don't define how they get paid for, expect friction.

There are three common patterns:

1. Employees buy a travel eSIM personally and submit it as a travel expense, just like a hotel or taxi.

2. The company sets up an account with one or more eSIM providers, and the mobility or IT team assigns eSIMs as needed.

3. The primary carrier provides its own eSIM-based roaming bundles, which are billed like any other service on the invoice.

Each has trade-offs. Reimbursement is easy to roll out but messy to control. Centralized purchasing is tidy but requires process and administration. Carrier-based eSIM options are simple but may not be the best value.

Whatever you choose, spell out a few basics in writing:

• When is a travel eSIM an acceptable spend?

• Is there a per-trip or per-month budget guideline?

• Do employees need pre-approval, or is it automatically allowed for any international trip?

Without that guidance, people will either overspend without realizing it or avoid buying a travel eSIM at all and fall back onto your most expensive roaming default.

Coverage, Experience, and the Human Factor

Cost matters, but so does whether the thing actually works when the plan lands.

Travel eSIM providers are not all created equal. Coverage quality, network partners, local speed, and support can vary. For your travelers, the experience is pretty binary: either the phone "just works" when they step outside the airport, or it doesn't. If it doesn't they'll blame IT, not the eSIM brand.

This means part of your policy discussion should be about user experience:

• Which countries do you really care about? (Top travel destinations, not a list of 120.)

• For those, do you have at least one travel eSIM option you've tested or reviewed?

• Do your people need voice and SMS, or is data-only enough given how much now runs over apps?

Even a short internal guide that says "if you're going to these five countries, here are the options we recommend and how to set them up" will save a lot of headaches and support tickets.

Local Rules and Edge Cases

There are also edge cases: countries where certain eSIM apps are restricted, where pre-registration is required, or where it's simply more practical to pick up a local SIM at the airport.

Your mobility policy doesn't need to catalog every regulatory nuance. It des help to flag the tricky regions and give simple guidance like "for these destinations stick with carrier roaming or talk to IT first."

The key is not perfection but avoiding surprises. The last thing you want is a traveler stranded with no data because the eSIM app they rely on is blocked locally.

A New Lever in Carrier Negotiations

Finally, there's the negotiation angle.

Roaming has historically been a high-margin, low-visibility revenue stream for carriers. When employees can self-provision travel eSIMs in seconds, that margin is no longer guaranteed. In practice, that give you leverage.

You don't have to threaten anymore. A calm, factual stance works just fine:

"Where your roaming rates are competitive, we'll standardize on your solution. Where they're not we'll use approved travel eSIMS instead."

That one sentence, backed by a clear internal policy, changes the conversation from "we have no alternative" to "we have options." Over time, that tends to pull roaming pricing closer to reality.

So, Should You Allow Travel eSIMs?

There isn't one-size-fits-all answer, but there is a better question: Under what condition do travel eSIMs make sense for us financially, operationally, and from a security standpoint?

If you can define those conditions, even in a one-page internal guideline, you're ahead of most organizations right now.

You don't have to solve everything on day one. Start small: pick your top routes, test one or two providers, write down what "good" looks like, and adjust your roaming policy to match. The technology will keep evolving, but if your policy is clear and intentional, you'll be in control of the economic instead of the other way around.