Mobile internet in Venice: a visitor's guide

Roaming here, in three lines

• EU and EEA plans: roam like at home applies, within the fair-use limit.
• UK plans: it depends on your operator since Brexit.
• Plans from outside Europe: usually roaming charges or a daily pass.

The rules in full, country by country, are in our guide to Internet in Italy.

From Marco Polo airport to the centre

The airport is on the mainland, so the way in is a bus across the bridge or a boat across the lagoon, and the two leave from different places. Which one you take, what the ticket costs and when the next one goes are all looked up on the phone, and the boat in particular does not run on a city-bus rhythm. You want data before you leave the terminal: for the ticket, for the timetable, for the message to the place you are staying and for the walk from the stop, which is never a straight line. Airport Wi-Fi usually asks for a registration and often cuts out after a set time, so do not build the arrival around it. Install the eSIM at home over Wi-Fi (step by step): it only starts counting when the phone connects to a network in Italy.

A labyrinth where the GPS loses the plot

Venice is the hardest city in Europe to be navigated by a phone. The alleys are narrow and the walls are high, so the satellite signal bounces before it reaches you and the blue dot drifts, turns the wrong way or places you in the canal. Add bridges, courtyards that look like streets and streets that end at the water, and a route that looks like five minutes turns into fifteen. Download the offline map of the whole city before you fly: GPS keeps working without data, the map does not. Inside museums, on ground floors and in the thick-walled rooms of old palaces, mobile coverage depends on the building and can simply go, the same as anywhere else built in stone.

Apps that eat data in Venice

• Offline maps, downloaded before you travel. Here you will open the map more often than anywhere else, and each time it reloads it costs data.
• The vaporetto: routes, times and tickets are checked and paid from the phone, and the app keeps refreshing while you wait at the pontoon.
• Timed-entry tickets for St Mark's Basilica and the Doge's Palace are booked and shown from the phone. Save them to your phone wallet or as a PDF the night before and a queue with no signal stops being a problem.
• The city access fee is handled online on certain days. Amounts and dates change from year to year, so check the official city website before you travel, and do it with data in hand.
• Water, sun and a screen that never rests drain the battery faster than you expect. Carry a power bank: a flat phone means no map, no ticket and no boat.

How much data

It depends on the days, on whether you watch video and on whether you share with a laptop. How much data do I need turns that into a number from what you actually do.

Prices for Italy

Data eSIMs for Italy: 3 GB for €4.49, 5 GB for €6.49, 10 GB for €11.79 and 20 GB for €16.99. It is data only, so your own line keeps your number and WhatsApp. Buy it weeks ahead if you like: installing does not start the plan, and the hotspot is included without any speed limit from us.