A weekend in Paris, fully connected

A short trip is the worst time to burn an hour figuring out connectivity - you don't have the slack in the schedule for it. Get the eSIM installed and your key apps ready before you leave, and Paris starts the moment you arrive rather than after you've found a café with decent wifi.

Before you fly

• Install the eSIM profile at home, on your home wifi. It only takes a minute, and it means nothing depends on airport wifi being any good.
• Download an offline map of central Paris. Most map apps let you save a region in advance - handy as a backup and it also means the map still loads instantly even on a slow connection.
• Set up a transit app. Paris's metro network is dense and mostly self-explanatory once you're moving, but having routes ready before you're stood on a platform saves the fumbling.

Getting into the city without a hitch

From Charles de Gaulle, the RER B runs straight into central Paris and is by far the simplest option if you're not weighed down with luggage - having your eSIM live before you land means you can check the platform and any service disruptions the second you're off the plane, rather than searching for wifi in the terminal first. From Orly, the airport-to-city options change often enough that it's worth checking the current route on the day rather than relying on an old blog post - your data connection makes that a thirty-second check instead of a guessing game.

On the ground

Switch the eSIM on as you land - with a regional plan, the 31-day window starts from that first connection, not from when you bought it, so there's no cost to setting it up weeks ahead and just flipping it on at the gate.

A translation app with offline/camera mode is worth having even if your French is fine for ordering coffee - menus, transit signage, and museum plaques move faster with a quick camera scan than a mental dictionary search. Most translation apps work over data with no extra setup once you're connected.

A rough day-by-day shape

Day one tends to be the heaviest on data - you're navigating somewhere unfamiliar, looking up opening hours, and probably taking more photos than the rest of the trip combined. By day two you've usually got your bearings, so navigation drops off and it's mostly messaging, maps for the odd new neighbourhood, and whatever you're posting. Budget more for the first day than the second if you're trying to estimate ahead of time - the calculator further down assumes a flat rate per day, but real trips are rarely that even.

If you're doing the big sights

The Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, and most major museums now sell timed-entry tickets online, and having them ready on your phone (screenshot as a backup, in case a queue is somewhere signal is patchy) saves standing in the ticket line as well as the security one. The same goes for the Eiffel Tower - booking a slot ahead means you skip a queue that can otherwise eat a meaningful chunk of a short weekend. None of this needs much data, but it does need to be sorted before you're stood at the entrance trying to buy on the spot.

Rough data budget for a weekend

For a typical weekend of maps, messaging, some photos and social posting, and transit navigation, most people land somewhere in the low single-digit gigabytes per day. If you're also streaming music on the move or video-calling home, plan for more. The GB calculator on the homepage gives a quick estimate based on your trip length and how you tend to use data - for a two- or three-day trip like this, the Carry-On plan usually covers it comfortably.

Heading further afield after Paris? The same eSIM covers 31 countries on one plan - see the full list on the coverage page.