Guide
eSIM hotspot and tethering
Hotspot is the feature travellers check last and regret first. It turns one eSIM into connectivity for a laptop, a tablet and a travel companion, which is either excellent value or a plan destroyed in an afternoon. This guide sets out which providers allow it, the caps that apply, why throttling hits tethering hardest, and how to share without paying twice.
Why permission is a question at all
Home carriers have historically treated tethering as a premium feature, because a laptop consumes far more than a phone and because a shared connection is harder to model. Travel eSIM providers have mostly gone the other way and allow it by default, partly because their plans are prepaid so there is no runaway bill to protect against.
That does not make it unlimited in practice. Permission and capacity are separate questions, and the interesting differences are in the second one.
Provider by provider
| Provider | Hotspot | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Airalo | Allowed | No tethering fee stated |
| Holafly | Allowed, capped at 1GB per day | The only hard published ceiling |
| Saily | Allowed | Unlimited plans throttle to 1 Mbps once the daily allowance is gone |
| Nomad | Allowed | Throttles to 512 kbps, the lowest of the group |
| Ubigi | Allowed, described as data sharing | Throttles to 2 Mbps, the most workable reduced tier |
| Maya Mobile | Allowed | Daily high-speed quota is not published |
Read that table as two groups. Holafly limits the volume you may share. Everyone else limits the speed at which you may share it once a daily allowance runs out. Both are real constraints and they bite in different situations.
What 1GB of hotspot actually buys
Holafly's cap is worth taking literally, because a gigabyte goes further on a phone than most people expect and nowhere near as far on a laptop. Zoom publishes 1.2 Mbps each way for a 720p call, which counting both directions is roughly 1.1GB per hour. A single one-hour video meeting from a laptop therefore consumes the entire daily hotspot allowance.
Ordinary laptop work is gentler but not trivial. Email, documents, a cloud folder syncing and a browser with a dozen tabs comfortably reaches a gigabyte across a working day, and that is before a background operating system update decides your hotspot looks like a good moment. If your trip involves working from a laptop, treat hotspot capacity as the first thing you check rather than the last.
Why throttling hurts tethering more
A throttle applies to the connection, not to each device. When a Nomad plan drops to 512 kbps, that half-megabit is what the laptop, the tablet and your partner's phone are collectively sharing. On a phone alone, 512 kbps still handles maps, messaging and music. Split three ways it struggles with a web page.
This is the strongest practical argument for Ubigi's 2 Mbps reduced tier if you expect to tether on an unlimited plan, and the strongest argument for a large fixed-data bundle instead, where full speed continues right up until the allowance is spent. The trade-offs between the two are set out in what unlimited really means.
Worked example: two people, one plan
Two travellers on a ten-day trip. One buys a plan, the other tethers to it. Baseline phone use is about 350MB each per day, so 700MB combined, plus an hour of phone-quality video in the evening for one of them at roughly 250MB. Call it 950MB a day, which is 9.5GB over ten days and about 12GB with a sensible buffer.
One 20GB bundle beats two 10GB bundles on price per gigabyte on essentially every destination we track, and it leaves headroom for the day the hotel wi-fi fails. The catch is that the sharing traveller is dependent on the other person's phone being awake, charged and in the room, which is a real constraint on a trip where you split up during the day.
Five settings that protect the plan
- Mark the hotspot as a metered or low data connection on the laptop. Both Windows and macOS then defer large background downloads.
- Pause operating system and app updates for the duration of the trip. This is the single largest avoidable cost.
- Sign out of cloud photo and file sync on the laptop, or set it to wi-fi only. Sync does not care that the wi-fi it can see is your phone.
- Cap video quality in each streaming app rather than in the operating system, since app defaults usually win.
- Turn the hotspot off between uses. Left on, it will quietly serve every device that has ever joined it.
Buy for the hotspot
If tethering is part of your plan rather than an afterthought, size the bundle using how much eSIM data do you need, then compare the larger tiers directly. Every destination table shows price per gigabyte, which is exactly the number that decides a hotspot purchase.
Common questions
Can you use a hotspot on a travel eSIM?
On every plan in our comparison tables, yes. Airalo, Holafly, Saily, Nomad, Ubigi and Maya Mobile all permit hotspot sharing. The differences are in the caps rather than in permission, and Holafly is the one provider that publishes a hard daily hotspot limit.
Does hotspot use more data than using the phone?
Tethering itself adds no meaningful overhead. What changes is the device on the other end. A laptop loads desktop pages, syncs cloud storage and downloads operating system updates, so the same hour of use costs several times more than it would on a phone.
Why does my hotspot feel slower than my phone?
Once an unlimited plan throttles, the reduced speed is shared across every attached device rather than granted to each one. A 1 Mbps throttle split between a laptop and two phones is close to unusable, while the same throttle on a phone alone is merely slow.
Can I share one eSIM with my travel companion?
Yes, and it is often the cheapest way to connect two people. Buy one larger bundle rather than two small ones, since price per gigabyte falls as bundles grow, and agree in advance that streaming stays on hotel wi-fi.
Hotspot permissions and caps described here were read from each provider's own documentation on our last price check and apply to the plans listed in our tables. Individual plans can carry different terms, so confirm on the plan page before buying.