How many GB do you really need for your trip?

It's the question we get more than any other, usually right before a departure: « How many GB do I actually need? » And the honest answer is: it depends a lot less on your destination than on your thumbs. Two people on the same trip can burn through wildly different amounts of data — one checks a map twice a day, the other live-streams the map.

So instead of a magic number, here's how to find your number.

What actually consumes what

Orders of magnitude, because that's all you need (exact figures vary with apps and quality settings):

— Navigation (Maps, Citymapper): light — roughly 5 to 10 MB per hour of active guidance. Use it all day, it stays small.
— Messages: text is negligible. Photos add a few MB each; videos, much more.
— Music streaming: around 50 to 100 MB per hour depending on quality.
— Social feeds with video (stories, reels): the trap of the list — easily several hundred MB per hour, sometimes up to a gigabyte at high quality. Scrolling is the new streaming.
— Video calls: roughly 500 MB to 1 GB per hour.
— Video streaming: about 1 GB per hour in standard quality, up to 3 GB in HD.
— Hotspot for a laptop: a multiplier, not an amount — a laptop behaves like three phones, especially if it decides to update itself.

« Your data budget isn't about where you go. It's about what your phone does when you're not looking. »

Three traveller profiles

The minimalist — maps, messages, bookings, a weather check. Often under 1 GB per week. A small plan does the job, with room to spare.

The connected traveller — all of the above, plus music on the go, social feeds in the evening, photos shared as they happen. Plan for roughly 2 to 3 GB per week, more if reels are involved. This is most people, and most people underestimate it.

The creator / remote worker — daily stories, video calls that must not drop, laptop tethering between trains. Think in gigabytes per day, not per week, and aim large: running out of data during a client call costs more than any plan.

The silent budget-killers

Most blown data budgets die in the background, not on the screen. The usual suspects: photo backup running on cellular (one day of holiday photos can be enormous), app stores updating over mobile data, video autoplay in feeds, and cloud drives syncing folders you forgot existed. Five minutes of settings before departure neutralises all of them.

Still hesitating between two sizes?

Pick your destination on the destinations page: the built-in estimator asks a few questions about how you travel and points you to a plan that fits, with the price displayed before you commit. And if your trip turns out bigger than your plan — that happens to the best trips — topping up an eSIM doesn't involve a single queue.

The right amount of data is the one that lets you forget the question. Decide once, then go look at something better than a counter.

— The AEY team.