Heraklion Airport SIM cards, and how much data Crete needs

EU contracts need nothing here

Crete is Greece and Greece is in the EU, so an EU or EEA phone contract roams at its domestic rate with no purchase and no counter. Check your operator's fair-use roaming cap before you fly — it is usually below your home allowance — and otherwise ignore the rest of this page's shopping advice. Most summer arrivals at Heraklion fall into this group.

If you are coming from the UK, North America, Australia or Asia, read on.

What is in arrivals

Cosmote and Vodafone both sell in the HER arrivals area. The queue is around ten minutes at peak and three minutes off-peak, and no ID is required for a prepaid SIM in Greece, so the transaction itself is quick. A SIM at a Greek airport runs about $15 in our data; we do not hold the allowance behind that figure.

We do not hold opening hours for the Heraklion counters. Athens' counters close at 23:00, and it would be reasonable to assume an island airport does not stay open later, but that is an assumption rather than something we know. Heraklion runs heavy late-evening charter traffic in season. If you are landing at night, treat the counter as a maybe.

Free wifi runs through the terminal.

Size the plan for the island, not for the city

This is where Crete differs from a city break. The island is 260 km end to end, and a normal Crete holiday involves a hire car and a lot of driving: the Lasithi plateau, the road out to Elafonissi, the Samaria gorge, the drive to Chania and back. That is navigation running for hours a day, on roads where you also want a working phone for the practical reason that a lot of it is empty.

A 1 GB plan is a city-weekend plan. It is the wrong purchase for Crete. Live maps, a few hotel check-ins and the odd video call will clear 5 GB in a fortnight without trying.

The numbers

Prices are per plan in US dollars with the duration attached. Airalo's rows were read from its own store on 13 August 2026 and Nomad's from nomadesim.com on 17 August 2026.

Greece does not stop at 20 GB, and the 50 GB row is where the value is. Nomad's 50 GB over 30 days at $31 is $0.62 a gigabyte, the cheapest rate in the country; Airalo's 50 GB at $42 is $0.84. For a two-week driving holiday either is the row that makes sense, and Nomad's costs less than three times the 5 GB plan for ten times the data. An earlier version of this page put Nomad's 20 GB at $22 and called it unconfirmed; the checked price is $21, or $1.05 a gigabyte.

That also puts the roughly $15 airport SIM in perspective: it needs to include about 24 GB to match the cheapest eSIM rate. The full ladder is on the Greece hub.

Which network reaches the mountains

Crete's coverage question is a real one — the interior is mountainous and villages sit in valleys — but we cannot answer it through the eSIM providers, because none of them has a confirmed host network here.

Airalo publishes no network for Greece at all; Meraki Mobile is its product name, not a carrier. Saily publishes nothing either — its Greek pages name no carrier, only "a reliable connection from the country's best networks" — so an earlier version of this page was wrong to put it on Cosmote and Vodafone. eSIMCard is the only one of the six sellers that publishes a host network at all — we read that directly on its Japan page — but the carriers our own data carried for it here came from this site's generated text rather than from eSIMCard, so we no longer repeat them. Nomad and Holafly name nothing — this page previously said Nomad named Cosmote and Holafly named Cosmote, Nova and Vodafone, and both came from our data rather than from the sellers. So no listing here is one we can stand behind, and none of it should decide your purchase.

If mountain coverage is genuinely critical to your trip — you are hiking, or staying somewhere remote — the argument for buying at the counter in arrivals is that you can pick the carrier yourself and know what you have got. That is the one thing $15 and ten minutes buys you that an eSIM does not.