Using a European eSIM for Travel, with No Voice Number

For decades, my practice when travelling to Europe was to make one of my first stops upon first landing the cell phone shop of whatever carrier had the best deal on a prepaid SIM card. I’d end up with a combined package of voice, texts, and data for the time I’d be away.

The introduction of the eSIM — a SIM card, but without the card, that gets virtually installed into the phone via an app — has made things a lot simpler: no need to make the visit to the shop, as the entire transaction can be done from an app; no need to fiddle with SIM card cutters (yes, there was such a thing); and “topping up” — always the Achilles heel of any low-end SIM card, happens in the same app, so no more visits to tobacco shops to purchase top-up minutes.

This last trip, to Belgium and the Netherlands, I decided to go one step further, and to dispense with a plan that included voice and text, and go data-only. I choose Jetpac, somewhat at random, and the process of selecting a plan and installing the eSIM proved easy and relatively inexpensive.

The open question: were there going to be circumstances where I’d miss having a real European telephone number, with the ability to send and receive texts and make voice calls.

Here’s what happened on the ground:

• In Liège, the app-based ebike rental scheme was Dott, and the Dott app required confirmation vis SMS during the initial setup phase. I worked around this by setting up a free 3-day try virtual SMS from Hushed.
• In Ghent, I needed to make a voice call to the organizer of our bike tour, to get permission to make a repair to Lisa’s bike. I was able to do this by buying some voice minutes to use inside the Jetpac app, which acts as a voice-over-IP app for making outgoing calls. The only downside: they couldn’t call me back, because it’s outgoing-only.
• To communicate with Android-owning Belgian and Dutch friends to coordinate lunch plans, we used Signal.
• To communicate with home (and with each other), we used Apple’s iMessages app and FaceTime.

All in all, I didn’t missing the native texting and voice calling abilities, and for future travels I plan to repeat the data-only plan.