Buying a SIM card in Colombia: every option, with queue times

The three airports that matter

Colombia's main international gateways all sell SIM cards on arrival, and the waits are short by international standards:

Ten minutes at the worst of the three is not a queue worth restructuring your arrival around. If you want a physical SIM, buying at the airport is a reasonable plan in Colombia — which is not true everywhere.

No ID is required at most retail outlets, and our country data records the rule as instant purchase with no identification. Have your passport in your bag regardless; you will have just cleared immigration with it anyway.

What it costs

A tourist data package at the airport runs about $10. In carrier stores, tourist packages are priced between COP 20,000 and COP 50,000, which is roughly $5 to $12 depending on what you buy.

So the range is narrow and the floor is low. Colombia is one of the cheaper countries in the world to buy mobile data in, and the difference between the airport counter and a city shop is small enough that convenience should probably decide it.

What our data does not record is how much data each of those packages includes. Without that we cannot give you a cost per gigabyte for the local option, and we are not going to estimate one.

Buying in town instead

Claro, Movistar and Tigo all sell SIM cards through carrier stores nationwide, not just at the three airports. WOM is a fourth national carrier.

If you have a choice, Claro is the one we would point most visitors at. It carries the widest coverage in the country — around 98% of the population, including the coffee region, the Caribbean coast and rural towns. Movistar is the faster network in cities, and was named best-performing network in Opensignal's April 2026 report, sweeping nine categories. For a trip that stays in Bogotá, Medellín and Cartagena, either is fine. For anything that goes rural, Claro.

National average speed is about 55 Mbps.

Public WiFi as a bridge

You do not have to solve this in the first hour. Public WiFi is excellent in Bogotá, Medellín and Cartagena, helped by sustained public investment through the Zonas WiFi programme. That is enough to get a taxi booked, a hotel found and a message sent while you decide what to buy — or while an eSIM finishes activating.

The option that skips the counter

Every major Colombian carrier supports eSIM, tourists included, and international eSIM providers cover the country too. If your phone takes an eSIM, buying before you fly removes the counter, the queue and the paperwork entirely — you land already connected.

Saily's 1GB over seven days is a verified $4.99, read on 18 August 2026 — this page previously listed it at $3.99, which Saily does not charge. The cheapest prices we have checked ourselves are both $4 for a single gigabyte: Airalo's Chimba package over three days, read from Airalo's own site on 13 August 2026, and Nomad's over seven days, read from Nomad's on 17 August 2026. Airalo's second Colombia package, Chimba+, sells 1GB over seven days at $4.50. Airalo does not say what separates the two, and unlike some of its other countries neither package undercuts the other on an identical allowance — they simply carry different plans.

Against a $10 airport package, a $4 eSIM wins on price for a short light trip. Over a longer stay the answer depends on the local package's allowance, which we do not have — so if you are here for a month, it is worth asking at the counter what COP 50,000 actually buys before dismissing it.

Check your handset first on eSIM compatible phones, and see the full provider comparison on the Colombia hub.