SAS is putting a free eSIM in every booking. The interesting part isn't the free bit.

Scandinavian Airlines has started bundling a mobile data eSIM into its app, included with every booking. The "SAS Travel eSIM" is a white-label service built by Amsterdam's Hubby eSIM but wrapped entirely in SAS branding: passengers install it inside the SAS app before they fly, activate it when they land, and skip the usual scramble for a local SIM or the bill-shock of legacy roaming. It covers more than 190 countries, applies across all fare types, and the initial rollout is aimed at tickets bought outside the EU. You need a EuroBonus account to get it.

"Connectivity is no longer an add-on to travel, it is an expectation," says Michaela Hermans, VP e-Commerce at SAS. On that, she is plainly right.

Our take

Here is what I think is actually going on, because it is more interesting than "airline gives away free data."

This is a loyalty play dressed as a perk. The giveaway is gated behind a EuroBonus account. That is the tell. SAS is not feeling generous; it is buying a reason for you to book direct, sign in, and open the app at the one moment you are most receptive to it - landing in a foreign country with no signal. Connectivity is the bait; the loyalty hook and the first-party data are the catch.

"Outside the EU first" is the giveaway. Inside the EU, roaming has been effectively free for years thanks to roam-like-at-home, so an EU eSIM would be a perk with no value. The real money has always been in non-EU roaming, where the per-megabyte gouging lived. By leading with tickets outside the EU, SAS is aiming the free eSIM squarely at the journeys where connectivity still costs real money - which is exactly where it does the most damage to someone else's margin.

And that someone is the mobile operator. When a white-label travel brand inserts itself as your connectivity provider the moment you land abroad, the roaming revenue that used to flow to your home network quietly stops. The airline owns the relationship; Hubby supplies the pipes; the MNO that has spent years trying to make travel roaming a premium product gets disintermediated by a free checkbox in a booking flow. Hubby has openly been calling on the travel industry to fold connectivity into the core product. SAS is the proof it is working.

Watch the bit nobody is quoting: the data allowance. Every breathless write-up mentions 190 countries. None of them I have seen states how much data you actually get. That omission usually means it is a teaser - enough to get you onto the network and prompt a top-up, not enough to stream your way through a fortnight in Bangkok. Free until it isn't.

The bigger picture is the one the standalone travel-eSIM crowd should be reading carefully. Holafly, Airalo and the rest built a tidy business on the friction SAS is now removing for nothing. When the eSIM is simply in the ticket, "buy our travel eSIM" becomes a much harder sell. The gold rush in travel connectivity always had a ceiling, and it looks a lot like this: connectivity stops being a product you sell to travellers and becomes table stakes baked into whatever they have already bought. SAS won't be the last airline to work that out.

Source: Travolution, 16 June 2026.