Airalo in Hungary: one plan makes most of the range pointless

Most European visitors should buy nothing at all

Hungary is in the EU. If your phone contract comes from an EU or EEA country, roam-like-at-home applies and your normal allowance travels with you to Budapest at no extra charge. Check your fair-use data cap before you fly, then, for a week in Hungary, buy nothing — not from Airalo, not from anyone.

The rest of this page is for everyone else: arrivals from outside the EU and EEA, and anyone whose contract bills for European roaming.

Every price here was read off Airalo's own site

We checked all 18 of Airalo's Hungary plans on 13 August 2026. These are quotes rather than estimates. Airalo sells them under its own product name, Szia! — that is the branding on your order, not a network.

Read down a column before you read across one. 5GB costs $11.50 whether the window is seven days or fifteen, and $12 for thirty: fifty cents buys four times as long. The 10GB ladder behaves the same way — $18, $18.50, $19. There is almost never a reason to take the short version. Save 50c on a 7-day plan for an eight-day trip and you spend the last day topping up or offline.

The 50GB plan is the whole story

On the longest window each size is sold with, the cost per gigabyte runs: $4.00 at 1GB, $2.67 at 3GB, $2.40 at 5GB, $1.90 at 10GB, $1.60 at 20GB — and 72c at 50GB.

The last step is the strange one. 20GB for 30 days is $32. 50GB for 30 days is $36. Four dollars buys another 30 gigabytes. If you were considering the 20GB plan for any reason at all, take the 50GB; there is no arithmetic in which the smaller one wins.

It also reprices the unlimited tiers, which Airalo sells by the day:

Unlimited for fifteen days costs $48 — twelve dollars more than 50GB for a full month, and hardly any visitor to Hungary gets through 50GB in a fortnight. The 30-day unlimited at $69 is nearly double the metered equivalent. Unlimited only earns its price at the short end: $11.50 for three days is the same money as 5GB for fifteen, and for a long weekend in Budapest with a laptop tethered that is a fair trade.

Against Holafly the comparison runs the opposite way to usual. Holafly's Hungary pricing in our data is indicative rather than verified — $19 for five days of unlimited and $36.90 for ten — while Airalo's verified equivalents are $18.50 and $34.50. On those figures Airalo is the cheaper unlimited seller here, which is not a sentence we often get to write.

Szia! is a product name, and the network is a blank

Airalo does not publish which Hungarian network its plans roam onto — not here, and not in any other country. Szia! is retail branding. We have seen names like it mistaken for carriers on comparison sites, and recommendations built on the mistake; there is no carrier information in it.

For most Hungarian itineraries that gap is tolerable. Budapest, the Danube Bend, Eger, Pécs and the motorway network are well served by all three national operators. It matters where Hungarian coverage genuinely thins: the remote Zemplén Mountains in the north-east, some dead spots along the southern shore of Lake Balaton, and deep inside the Aggtelek caves — though nothing works underground. If you are walking the Zemplén, a local SIM lets you choose the carrier and an Airalo plan does not.

Where Airalo loses, and what the airport counter costs

At the small end it is beaten. Saily's 1GB is $3.99 for seven days against Airalo's $4 for three — a penny cheaper for more than twice the window, and both figures are now checked. Nomad's 3GB/30-day is $9 against Airalo's verified $8 for 3GB over seven days, and its 10GB/30-day is $16 against Airalo's verified $19 — both Nomad figures read from its own store on 17 August 2026, where an earlier version of this page had them at $7 and $14 on an unchecked listing. Those rival figures are indicative rather than read at source, so treat the margins as approximate; the direction is not in doubt.

At 5GB Saily edges ahead by a cent — its verified $11.99 for 30 days against Airalo's $12 and Nomad's $12.50. This page previously put Saily at $12.99, a figure never read off Saily. Above 10GB it no longer has the market to itself: Nomad sells 20GB for $20 against Airalo's $32, and 50GB for $45 against Airalo's $36. Airalo wins the top of the ladder and loses the rung below it.

Then there is the counter on arrival. A Hungarian prepaid SIM runs around $8 at the airport with no ID required and no registration wait, which undercuts most of Airalo's range and comes with a Hungarian number attached. What it does not do is work the moment you land. The full spread sits on our Hungary hub.