Staying connected in Greece

An eSIM is the straightforward answer for a US phone in Greece, and the only real trick is to install it before you leave rather than after you land. Installation needs a working data connection, which is precisely what you do not have standing in the arrivals hall — so buy it at home, install it at home, and leave it switched off until you touch down. Activation is then a toggle rather than a scramble.

For a family, the thing that pays for itself is not more eSIMs but a small travel router. Hotel Wi-Fi is usually one device per room code, or a captive portal that every phone and tablet has to be walked through separately, or both — and that ritual repeats at every hotel. A travel router uplinks to the hotel network once, clears the portal once, and republishes it as a network of your own with a name and password that never change. Every device in the family joins automatically at the next hotel without anyone touching a settings screen, and the tablet that only ever connects to your own network keeps working the whole trip.

Download offline maps by region before you go anywhere, and do it on hotel Wi-Fi rather than burning cellular data on it. Coverage across Greece is good in the places you would expect and genuinely absent in some of the places you will drive, and the mountain sections of Laconia have real dead spots. A navigation app that quietly stops receiving data halfway up a switchback is a bad place to discover the limit, and offline maps make it a non-event.

Do the same for anything else that assumes connectivity. Boarding passes, ticket confirmations and hotel addresses are all better held as screenshots than as links, because the moment you need them is disproportionately likely to be the moment you have one bar.