The Americas Are the World's Most Expensive Region for Travel Data

Key findings

All figures from the frozen July 2026 edition of the Americas eSIM Price Index: 11-reseller panel, USD at the exchange rate frozen on publication (1.1415).

A structural premium, not a seasonal one

The Americas top every regional comparison we run. At $4.04 per gigabyte (median across 26 destinations), the region prices data 3.2 times above Europe and 2.3 times above Asia, on the same 11-reseller panel, converted at the same frozen exchange rate. The cheapest market in the region, United States at $1.35, would sit mid-table in Asia; the most expensive, Belize at $16.07, has no equivalent anywhere else we track.

And it is not a summer effect: the regional median barely moved between May 24, 2026 and July 27, 2026 (-6.1% over 10 weekly readings), while Europe dropped sharply over the same period. The premium is structural: fewer resellers per market, less competition, and wholesale rates that stay high across the Caribbean and parts of South America.

The July 2026 extremes

Charts (free to reuse with credit)

Reusable figures (CC BY 4.0)

Quote freely with attribution to Drift Americas and a link to this study:

• The Americas are the most expensive region tracked for prepaid eSIM data: median $4.04 per GB across 26 destinations (July 2026).
• Travel data in the Americas costs 3.2 times more than in Europe (medians $4.04 vs $1.27 per GB, same panel, same month).
• The most expensive market tracked in the region is Belize at $16.07 per GB.

Full dataset (CSV) · Weekly series (JSON) · Press one-pager (PDF)

Methodology

Prices were collected in July 2026 across a fixed panel of 11 international eSIM resellers (Airalo, Nomad, Saily, Ubigi, Yesim and others). Each destination figure is the average price per gigabyte across the panel, converted from EUR to USD at the ECB reference rate frozen on publication (1.1415). The study covers the 26 Americas destinations that Drift Americas sells and that the panel prices. Weekly trend data comes from our price history, recorded every Monday since May 24, 2026. This is a one-shot study: figures are frozen as published and will not be revised.

The median is computed over all 26 priced destinations. For the cheapest and most expensive tables, we exclude only prices that rest on a thin panel: a market is dropped from the ranking when fewer than 3 resellers price it and its price sits above the regional median. This is the marker of a data artefact (a single niche reseller in a micro-market), not of a genuinely expensive destination, so legitimately costly markets with a full panel are kept. No market was excluded this month.

Transparency

Drift Americas sells travel eSIMs. The panel behind this study includes our competitors, the raw data is published under CC BY 4.0, and every figure above can be recomputed from the CSV. Data questions and interview requests: via driftamericas.com.