When travelers think about the environmental impact of a trip, flights, hotels and transportation usually come to mind first; eSIMs rarely do. Getting a phone working abroad is another practical detail to take care of before a trip, rather than something travelers tend to think about from an environmental perspective.

The Holafly 2026 Summer Travel & eSIM Report looks at whether travelers are beginning to look at this differently. The findings suggest that sustainability is becoming part of the conversation around mobile data, even if it is not yet a deciding factor for everyone.

What makes an eSIM a greener choice?

Think about what normally happens when you buy a traditional SIM card for a vacation: you pick up a small piece of plastic, put it in your phone for a week or two, and once the trip is over, it usually ends up forgotten in a drawer or thrown in the trash.

It might be tiny, but that card has already been on quite a journey. It had to be manufactured, packaged, transported across the globe, and eventually delivered to a shop or airport kiosk. All of that physical movement happens before you have even used a single megabyte of data.

With an eSIM, that journey disappears because there is no physical card to manufacture, package or ship; instead, the mobile data profile is downloaded directly to the phone.

An eSIM is not impact-free, of course; phones, networks and the infrastructure behind digital services still require energy and resources. The relevant difference here is what the eSIM removes from the physical process: there is no SIM card to produce, wrap and distribute, which is why the shift from a physical SIM to an eSIM can make a measurable difference. Research by the Carbon Trust found that making this switch to a digital data profile can reduce emissions by up to 87%.

For one traveler, getting rid of one tiny plastic card might not feel particularly significant. But when millions of people do, those small choices start to add up.

The scale of this impact becomes easier to understand when you look at Holafly’s own numbers: with an estimated average saving of 114.7 grams of CO₂ per physical SIM and over 25 million eSIMs sold, Holafly has prevented more than 2.867,5 tons of CO₂ from being released into the atmosphere since 2022.

But are travelers actually thinking about any of this?

Probably not every time they open their phone. When you are preparing for a holiday, sustainability might influence the airline you choose, where you stay or how you get around; but the environmental impact of your mobile data is much easier to overlook.

That is exactly what Holafly’s 2026 Summer Travel & eSIM Report wanted to explore: when travelers choose how they will stay connected abroad, does sustainability actually enter the conversation?

The numbers point to a yes, at least for a majority: when asked directly, 24.1% of respondents said sustainability will be an important factor in how they choose to stay connected abroad, and another 39.2% said they will take it into account, even if it won’t be what makes or breaks the decision. Put those two groups together and you get 63.3% of planned eSIM users who are thinking about the environmental side of their mobile data.

That number shows how the carbon footprint of a SIM card, something that felt almost too small to matter at first glance, is no longer invisible to most travelers.

But the other side of that statistic is worth looking into as well, as nearly 14% of respondents said they had no idea that different mobile data options even carry different environmental impacts. Another 22.8% said it simply will not influence their decision at all.

So while awareness is growing, there is still a real gap between people who know this trade-off exists and people who have never been given a reason to think about it.

Why do business travelers seem to care more?

One of the more interesting insights in the data has less to do with sustainability itself and more to do with who is traveling and why: people traveling for work show a combined consideration rate of 74.7%, compared to 59.4% for those traveling for leisure.

This gap widens even more when you isolate the ones who think of sustainability as a deciding factor: almost 40% of business travelers did, versus just 18.8% of leisure travelers, a difference of nearly 21 percentage points.

But what does this tell us? It does not necessarily mean business travelers are more environmentally conscious than other people. A more likely explanation is structural: corporate travel often comes with its own sustainability policies and reporting requirements, so professionals may be more used to taking the environmental impact into account because their companies already do. Vacation planning, by contrast, doesn’t come with that same institutional weight.

Caring about it and actually planning for it are two different things

The purpose of a trip is not the only thing that shapes how much sustainability weighs in; where you are going matters too.

Even among travelers who do care, there is a difference between knowing something and acting on it once the trip is actually happening. That mismatch becomes visible when we compare domestic and international travelers.

Those staying within their own country show a consideration rate of 65.8%, while international travelers sit slightly lower, at 62.8%. On paper, this is a little counterintuitive: international trips tend to involve longer flights and a larger overall footprint, so you might expect the travelers with the biggest footprint to be the most attentive to it. Instead, they are a little less likely to prioritize sustainability when setting up their phone plan.

The likely explanation is not indifference but logistics: international trips come with visa requirements, currency exchanges, longer packing lists and unfamiliar networks. In that context, getting connected fast and avoiding unwanted surprises beats environmental consideration, even for someone who genuinely cares.

The upside: you don’t have to choose green to be green

Even so, travelers do not need to consciously pick an eSIM for environmental reasons in order for the environmental benefit to happen.

Even if the only thing driving the choice is convenience, the plastic card, the packaging and the shipping truck disappear anyway as a side effect of a decision made for entirely different reasons.

That is the most interesting finding: sustainable behavior does not always require a sustainability mindset. Sometimes it just requires the more convenient option and the greener one to be the same choice, which, in the case of eSIMs, they already are.

Methodology

The insights in this article are based on data from the Holafly 2026 Summer Travel & eSIM Report, focusing on a survey of 3,048 respondents that reflects stated travel plans for June to August 2026. Participants were recruited through Prolific, an independent research platform, to keep the sample separate from Holafly’s own user base. By asking them directly about their environmental views, the research provides a clear picture of how sustainability actually factors into modern mobile data decisions.