Picture the moment: you land somewhere new, open your phone, and nothing loads. No boarding pass, no hotel address, no ride-hailing app, no way to message home. That single failure can derail an entire trip, and no single travel company is in charge of fixing it.
That was the core of a conversation between Richard Trinder, senior director of strategic partnerships at eSIM provider Holafly, and Skift intelligence editor Dan Marcec at Skift Global Forum 2026. His argument: the smartphone has become the control centre of travel, holding boarding passes, payments, maps, messages and increasingly digital ID documents. Lose the connection and the whole trip effectively locks.
The weakest points are predictable — crossing borders into new connectivity zones, and patchy, sometimes insecure airport Wi-Fi. And here's the awkward part for the industry: a hotel can't control an airport's Wi-Fi outage, but it still suffers when a guest can't tell the hotel they've arrived. Travellers don't separate a connectivity failure from the brand they booked with. Trinder's blunt summary: consumers now have "zero tolerance for friction".
His solution is for airlines, hotels, booking platforms and connectivity providers to stop treating mobile data as a separate add-on and instead bake it into the booking flow itself, via APIs and software development kits. An eSIM would be bundled into your flight or hotel purchase the way contactless payments and digital boarding passes became invisible over time — he expects eSIMs to reach that same normality within about two years. Holafly, which covers more than 200 destinations, also sees maritime travel as an obvious case, since cruise passengers routinely drift between coverage zones or hit blackouts at sea.
There's a safety-net angle too. Holafly's "Always On" product keeps a baseline layer of data live for emergencies, aimed particularly at business travellers — the idea being that when a delay, storm or layover hits, you can still access the essentials without troubleshooting a data plan mid-crisis.
The stakes only rise from here. The industry is pouring money into AI-powered customer service, but none of it works if the traveller isn't connected. Trinder's advice to travel brands is to get the plumbing sorted now, before AI agents become the front line of the customer experience.
For everyday travellers, the takeaways are real. First, treat connectivity as a core part of trip planning, not a last-minute airport purchase — buying an eSIM before departure removes the riskiest handover moments. Second, don't rely on public airport Wi-Fi for anything sensitive; it's often slow, crowded and a hunting ground for cyberattacks. And third, note which brands are making this easy: airlines, hotels and booking platforms that offer embedded eSIMs are effectively acknowledging they share responsibility when your signal drops.
It's sponsored content from Holafly and Skift Studio, so read the product claims with that in mind. But the underlying point holds regardless of the vendor: your connection is now as basic a travel requirement as a valid passport, and the companies you book with are only starting to treat it that way.
