Buying a SIM card at Ezeiza on arrival

What is in EZE arrivals

Two carriers are listed as available in Ezeiza arrivals: Personal and Movistar. The queue runs about twenty minutes at peak and eight off-peak. A passport is required for SIM registration. Free WiFi is generally available in the terminal, and public transport and taxis both serve the airport.

We hold no shop names, no terminal or unit numbers and no opening hours for EZE. Ezeiza takes most of its long-haul traffic overnight and early morning, which is exactly when a retail counter is least likely to be staffed, so treat the desk as an opportunity rather than a plan.

Ezeiza also sits a long way out from central Buenos Aires. The transfer is the first thing you will want a phone for, which is an argument against the transfer being the thing you use to fill the time until you have one.

The peso problem

This is the part that makes buying at an Argentine airport genuinely harder than buying at, say, Madrid or Lisbon, and it has nothing to do with the SIM itself.

Argentine kiosk pricing is in pesos, and Argentina has run multiple effective exchange rates. Whether you are paying with a foreign card, with cash you changed at the airport, or with cash you brought, the rate applied to your purchase can vary — and you will be working it out at a counter, after a flight, with people behind you. A quoted peso price does not translate cleanly into "is this good value" the way a euro price does.

A travel eSIM is priced in dollars and charged in dollars. You know exactly what it cost before you board. That is a real advantage here in a way it is not in most countries, and it is worth more than the twenty minutes of queue.

What data actually costs in Argentina

Argentina is one of the more expensive markets we cover, and it genuinely stops at 20 GB — there is no 50 GB plan to look for. These are read from Airalo's own site:

$2.35 per gigabyte is the best verified rate in the country, and it only appears at the top of the range. Below that you are paying three to five dollars a gigabyte, which is poor by international standards. Nomad's Argentine prices have now been read off its own site and they do not undercut Airalo — its 20 GB month is $47, the same price to the cent. An earlier version of this page listed that plan at $33.

For a week in Buenos Aires where you are mostly on hotel and café WiFi and want maps and ride-hailing between them, the 3 GB or 5 GB week is the sensible size. Unlimited exists if you would rather not think about it: Airalo's verified unlimited is $35 for 7 days, and Holafly lists $27.30 for 7 days, which we have not verified.

A local SIM at an Argentine airport typically costs around $15. We do not know what allowance comes with it, and given the country's prices that is the single most important unknown on this page.

Networks: what is claimed, and by whom

eSIMCard is the only one of the six that publishes host networks anywhere, so its own Argentine listing is the only one worth opening. The Movistar and Claro pair our data used to carry for it came from this site's generated text rather than from eSIMCard, and has been withdrawn along with its prices. Airalo, Nomad, Saily and Holafly publish no host network for Argentina at all; Abrazo!, Airalo's name for the product at checkout, is a label rather than a carrier.

Notably, no provider in our data lists Personal. That matters much less in Buenos Aires than it would in Patagonia — you are in a dense urban market with all three national carriers present — but if you have a specific reason to want Personal, the EZE counter is the only route we can point to.

Verdict

Buy the eSIM before you fly. Dollar pricing you can check, no twenty-minute queue at the end of a long-haul, no passport scan, and a working phone before you decide how you are getting into the city. The counter is worth it only if you need an Argentine number, want Personal specifically, or your phone will not take an eSIM. Prices and providers across the country on our Argentina hub.