Living abroad is not the same as visiting

Here's the distinction that changes whose advice you should trust. A two-week trip tells you how a product behaves for two weeks, in the honeymoon window, when everything's new and you're not really depending on it. Living somewhere tells you how it holds up when it's not optional — when it's how you run your business, reach your kids, handle an emergency, and get through an ordinary Tuesday a long way from home.

We've spent over nine years on the second side of that line. We didn't fly somewhere to film a review and leave. We built lives abroad — homes, routines, a business, school runs, the whole unglamorous reality of it — and our connectivity had to work through all of it, not just for the highlight reel. That's a completely different test, and it's the one that actually matters when you're deciding what to rely on for your own trip.

What nine years abroad actually looks like

Not a passport-stamp count — a real, lived résumé. Here's where we've actually built our lives:

Costa Rica — around 7 years

Based in Sámara on the Guanacaste coast, where we built and ran our vacation rentals and lived on-site. Not a stopover — years of daily life, and years of learning how connectivity behaves in a country where the terrain fights every network.

Bangkok, Thailand — a year

A full year living in one of Asia's biggest cities, plus travel out to Pattaya, Hua Hin, Ayutthaya and the islands. Holafly Plans, the whole time.

Da Nang, Vietnam — a year

Another year based in a single city, traveling widely across the country — Hanoi, Hoi An, Hue, and more. Daily life, daily data, on Holafly.

Overland across borders

We've crossed from Vietnam through Laos into Thailand on one trip, and years earlier moved between Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama and Mexico. Border crossings aren't a novelty to us — they're routine, and we know exactly how staying connected works (and fails) across them.

That's twelve destinations we've used Holafly in firsthand — and the difference between us and a review-trip is that we were there long enough for the shine to wear off and the truth to show.

Why Holafly — even when others come knocking

Here's something we don't usually say out loud: we've been approached by other eSIM companies. When you've built an audience in the living-abroad space, offers come. We've turned them down and stayed with Holafly — and not because we're contractually trapped or sentimental about it.

We've stayed because, after four years with Holafly and twelve destinations of using it firsthand, we know it's the one we actually trust. We're not going to put our name on something we don't use ourselves, and we're certainly not going to switch our own family onto something worse for a paycheck. The strongest endorsement we can give any product is that we keep choosing it with our own money and our own connectivity on the line — and we do.

Sixteen months, four of us, every single day

This is the part that separates us from almost everyone reviewing eSIMs: Holafly Plans has been the only SIM our entire family uses, daily, for the last 16 months. No backup local SIM in a drawer. No "we tested it for this post." Chris, Shayna, and both our boys are all on Holafly Plans right now — it's what our whole family runs on.

Sixteen months of daily, sole-connectivity use across multiple countries teaches you things a two-week test never will: how the "unlimited" holds up when you actually lean on it every day, how it behaves crossing borders, where coverage thins and where it doesn't, how support responds when you genuinely need it. When we tell you something about Holafly, it's not from a spec sheet — it's from living on it.

What long-term daily use taught us that a review trip never could

The honest, hard-won stuff — the kind you only learn by depending on something for months, not days:

• "Unlimited" is genuinely unlimited for real travel use. We upload video, run a business, and video-call family across continents daily. A fair-use policy exists — as it does on every unlimited plan anywhere — but in 16 months of heavy use it has never been a problem for us. That's not a guess; it's a year-plus of evidence.
• Coverage follows the terrain, not the brand. Cities and populated areas are reliable; mountains, jungle and deep countryside thin out — and that's true of any network, not a Holafly quirk. Knowing this, we download offline maps before going remote. A review trip to a capital city would never teach you this.
• Borders are where an eSIM earns its keep. The moment you cross into "no man's land," a local SIM leaves you stranded. Holafly Plans and regional eSIMs reconnect on their own as you come into range on the other side. We've lived this repeatedly.
• The safety net matters more than the speed test. Always On (1 GB free monthly backup) and 24/7 support sound like fine print until the day your plan lapses or your shuttle driver vanishes at a border — and then they're the difference between "handled" and "stranded."

Our code, and what it saves

Because we're official Ambassadors, our code is a real, tracked discount — not a random string scraped onto a coupon site:

• 5% off destination and regional eSIMs
• 10% off monthly Plans
• Up to 20% off quarterly Plans
• Up to 30% off annual Plans (Holafly's ~20% annual promotion stacked with our 10% code)

For the full breakdown — every plan type, real pricing, and which one fits your trip — see our complete Holafly guide.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

Anyone can review a product. Fewer people can tell you how it holds up after nine years of actually living abroad, four years with Holafly — sixteen of those months as our only SIM, every day — and twelve destinations of depending on it with their whole family. That's the difference we bring — and it's why, when we tell you Holafly is what we trust and use ourselves, it's worth more than a two-week verdict. Our code is THEDUFRESNES, and it's the same one we use on every renewal.

See it all in our complete Holafly guide, or watch us actually travel on it on our YouTube channel.