There is something slightly absurd about the travel eSIM market. Telecom operators built much of the infrastructure beneath it. They own the networks, spectrum and customer relationships. They negotiated the roaming agreements. They invested in provisioning platforms and eSIM infrastructure. In many cases, the travel eSIM sitting on a tourist’s phone ultimately depends on those same operators somewhere in the wholesale chain.

And yet, when consumers started thinking seriously about eSIM for travel, a different set of brands became part of the vocabulary.

Airalo. Holafly. Nomad eSIM. Numero eSIM. Roamless. Saily. Yesim. etc.

Not necessarily Orange, Vodafone, Telefónica or Sunrise.

That does not mean operators have lost the eSIM market. Far from it. GSMA Intelligence found that more than 70% of surveyed travellers who used an eSIM abroad actually used an operator-provided service.

But something commercially important has happened nonetheless.

The companies that built much of the technology did not automatically own the category around it.

And in digital markets, category ownership matters.

The category gap

GSMA Intelligence puts global eSIM smartphone penetration at around 5% at the end of 2025 and expects that figure to reach 10% by the end of 2026. Consumer awareness has reached roughly 60%.

But there is another number operators should probably spend more time thinking about: only 8% of eSIM-aware consumers discovered the technology through an operator’s commercial channels.

READ MORE: From Travel Hack to Telecom Standard: GSMA’s Findings on eSIM

That is a strange outcome for an industry that introduced the technology in the first place.

The explanation is partly linguistic.

Travel eSIM companies rarely started by selling “eSIM technology”.

They sold internet in Japan.

They sold data for a week in the United States.

They sold a way around a €60 roaming bill.

They sold connectivity before the plane landed.

That sounds like semantics. Commercially, it is enormous.

Airalo organised connectivity around destinations. Holafly made unlimited data and trip duration central to its proposition. Nomad built around simple prepaid travel packages across a broad footprint. Saily extended the proposition into digital-security features such as web protection and virtual location tools.

These companies translated telecom infrastructure into travel problems people already understood.

Operators often continued translating it into tariffs.

Roaming zones. Daily passes. Fair-use policies. Activation instructions. Add-ons.

All perfectly legitimate.

But nobody wakes up three days before flying to Bangkok thinking, “I really need an improved roaming tariff architecture.”

They think: How am I going to get online when I land?

The company present at that moment has an enormous advantage.

Attention moved before the airport

This is perhaps the biggest change operators underestimated.

The connectivity decision increasingly happens long before somebody connects to a foreign network.

A traveller searches Google for “eSIM Japan”. They watch a YouTube video. They read a destination guide. Their airline sends a pre-departure email. Their banking app offers international data. Their OTA presents an eSIM next to the hotel booking. An AI assistant recommends several connectivity options while building the itinerary.

Connectivity discovery has moved upstream.

And specialist eSIM companies positioned themselves inside those discovery moments.

READ MORE: Travel eSIM Growth: Small Share, Big Market Signal

That is why their importance cannot be measured only by network traffic or subscriber numbers. They have influenced how consumers shop for connectivity.

The Financial Times reported in August that global demand for travel eSIMs is forecast to increase around 32% in 2026, reaching 134 million users. Traditional roaming is hardly disappearing — it remains highly profitable and deeply embedded in operator economics — but another purchasing behaviour is being created alongside it.

Ookla provides an equally useful reality check.

Its Q2 2026 measurements put branded travel eSIMs at just 3.4% of measured international roaming activity, up from 2.7% a year earlier. That is nowhere near domination.

But branded travel eSIM activity grew substantially faster than overall international roaming.

Small share. Fast trajectory.

Those two things can be true at the same time.

Operators still hold better cards

None of this means the specialist brands have structurally won.

In several respects, operators still possess the stronger hand.

They control networks. They have established billing relationships. They can provide voice, SMS and local numbers. They operate customer-support infrastructure at enormous scale. They understand local regulation. And unlike many travel eSIM brands, they can influence the underlying quality of connectivity rather than simply purchasing it.

That last point is becoming more important.

Ookla’s recent analysis of more than 50 travel eSIM brands showed substantial performance differences created by wholesale architecture and internet routing. Two eSIMs using the same visited mobile network can produce very different latency because traffic may exit the network thousands of kilometres apart.

READ MORE: Travel eSIM Latency: What Really Determines Speed?

In other words, the shiny app is only the surface.

Underneath sits a complicated telecom supply chain.

Operators could turn that into a powerful proposition: known network quality, better routing, transparent performance, voice integration, local identity, stronger support or premium connectivity guarantees.

But infrastructure advantages have to become customer-visible advantages.

Owning the network is not enough if somebody else owns the moment of purchase.

Orange is showing another route

Orange Travel is one of the more interesting examples of an operator recognising that problem.

Its strategy increasingly looks less like conventional roaming and more like travel distribution.

In 2026, Orange Travel partnered with Trip.com to place eSIM offers directly inside the travel-booking ecosystem. Customers can select the connectivity package through Trip.com before departure and activate it when they arrive.

Orange Travel says its broader service reaches more than 200 destinations through more than 700 network partnerships.

The interesting part is not simply that Orange sells travel eSIMs.

It is where Orange is selling them.

Trip.com sits much closer to the moment when someone is thinking about a journey than the roaming section of a mobile operator’s website.

Orange has also pushed distribution through travel-agency group Selectour, further moving connectivity into the travel-shopping environment.

That distinction matters.

Operators do not necessarily need to build another Airalo.

Some may choose to.

Others can become the preferred connectivity layer for airlines, hotel groups, OTAs, banks, super-apps and loyalty platforms.

Others may decide that their strongest position is wholesale — supplying the networks, roaming infrastructure and eSIM capabilities behind brands consumers never realise they are using.

All three strategies can work.

What matters is making the choice deliberately.

Visibility is now distribution

For years, telecom companies could think of visibility largely as a marketing issue.

That is becoming outdated.

In travel connectivity, visibility is increasingly part of distribution.

If a provider is missing when customers compare destinations, research roaming costs, book flights, receive pre-departure communications or ask an AI assistant what connectivity they should use, it is missing from the commercial journey itself.

That creates an unusual competitive landscape.

READ MORE: Why Mobile Operators Are Launching Travel eSIM Offers?

Travel eSIM brands are moving deeper into telecom: persistent eSIMs, subscriptions, loyalty, security features, richer apps and increasingly sophisticated wholesale arrangements.

Operators are moving in the opposite direction: travel-specific products, digital acquisition, embedded distribution and partnerships.

Fintechs, airlines, OTAs and super-apps are moving into the space from another direction entirely.

The boundary between telecom product and travel product is disappearing.

The bottom line

The mistake would be to reduce this contest to operators versus travel eSIM startups.

That is no longer the interesting battle.

The real battle is over who owns the connectivity decision.

An operator can own the network and still become invisible at the point where the customer chooses. A travel eSIM company can own the customer interface while depending heavily on infrastructure supplied by telecom operators. An airline, bank or OTA may own neither — yet still control the moment when connectivity is purchased.

That changes the strategic question for telcos.

It is not simply: Should we sell travel eSIM?

There are at least three defensible positions: own the consumer proposition, embed connectivity where travel demand already exists, or become the wholesale engine powering somebody else’s proposition.

What is far less defensible is drifting accidentally into the third position while competitors capture the customer, the data, the margin and the brand recognition.

Airalo, Holafly, Nomad eSIM and Saily demonstrated that network ownership does not guarantee category ownership.

Orange Travel is demonstrating the other side of the argument: operators can move beyond the network layer if they are willing to compete for discovery and distribution.

Telcos built eSIM.

The question now is whether they are prepared to build demand around it — or remain the invisible infrastructure underneath someone else’s brand.