Save money & hassle on your Travel: Best E-SIM for your Stay in Indonesia

Indonesia is quite popular (in a bad way) for their silly regulation regarding connectivity in Indonesia. Basically, in order to protect local industry, every device with IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) need to be registered in order to be connected with the local operators in Indonesia.

Now if you have an overseas number and activate roaming service in Indonesia, this wouldn’t be an issue as the regulation only applies to local telco operators. However paying for roaming isn’t always the best choice if cost is a concern.

Another option is to buy a local Indonesian number. The seller can whitelist the IMEI of your device as a “tourist” and you can use it with your device for up to 30 days. Afterwards, your device will lose connection with it due to the regulation mentioned in the beginning of this writing. You will then need to visit the nearest store that can assist you in renewing your device IMEI. Pretty troublesome right?

So, I would suggest you to just stick with your roaming plan to avoid the hassle. However, if you want to save a bit of money – I know some of roaming plan can be very expensive – I am looking at you, Vodafone Australia – then I have one simple advice for you: just get an E-SIM online.

Cheap and instant activation

You don’t need to visit any physical store in Indonesia to get an E-sim. Just make a purchase online that accept any international credit card, and you are good to go. They will send you a QR code to pair your device with the E-sim, and then your device can use the local plan in Indonesia immediately.

Since it’s E-SIM, you don’t need to remove any physical sim you might have in your device. Less hassle for more savings, I would say. E-SIM can be active for up to 30 days in Indonesia. If you stay for longer, simply get another package of E-SIM and remove the expired ones. Again, all done from some swipes and taps on your device – no removal necessary.

Trusted store for getting E-SIM in Indonesia

Many people sells their product on online marketplace in Indonesia, the most popular one being Tokopedia and Shopee. Unfortunately, their interface is in Bahasa Indonesia, and they often flag international credit cards as fraudulent. So I would say do yourself a favor and get your E-sim from this place instead: Global Komunika website.

Global Komunika has sold over 100.000 E-sims for both Indonesian and international customers. Their website supports English language and they accept international credit cards without additional fees.

You can check their rating on Google Maps, Tokopedia, and Shopee, although you might not understand the latter two. But the important takeaway is that they maintain a rating of 4.9/5.0 from thousands of transactions across the three platform – a remarkable feat!

You can also contact their customer service through Whatsapp, the most popular messaging app in Indonesia, where they can assist troubleshooting in English. Although I doubt you will need any troubleshoot since their service works just fine 100% of the time. It is also very easy to setup that I think toddlers and elderly can do it by themselves (no offense, anyone).

Flexibility to Customize the Data and Duration

One thing I really like about Global Komunika is that you are free to customize how many data do you need and for how long – they are not trying to force you to purchase an expensive plan with huge data and long duration that might be redundant for your travel plan.

You can choose from 3GB of data to 50GB of data, with the duration ranging from 3 days to 30 days. You would only need to pay as low as 6980 IDR (less than 0.5 USD as of August 2024) per GB!

By the way, in case you are wondering – yes, they also sell ESIM for other countries too! If you are financial savvy and understand how to take advantage of strong exchange rates against Indonesian rupiah, you can save a bit on your next travel by getting E-SIM here as well!

Save hassle and save cost on your next travel to Indonesia

To sum it up, if you are planning to visit Indonesia, make sure to get your connectivity plan from Global Komunika. It saves you a lot of trouble since you do not need to spend time buying physical sim cards in our airports, facing queues and dealing with staffs that might not understand English very well.

You will also save a lot of money compared to paying roaming plan to your local number or getting an Indonesian internet plan.