Buying a SIM card at Bucharest Henri Coandă (OTP)

One shop, one carrier, about $13

Bucharest Henri Coandă has a single route to a SIM card on arrival: a Relay store in the arrivals area selling Orange Romania prepaid SIMs at roughly $13. There is no operator-run counter, no second carrier to compare against, and no eSIM sold on site.

Thirteen dollars is not a gouge. Plenty of European airports charge three or four times that for a tourist SIM, and this is one of the few airport pages on this site where the honest answer is that the counter price is defensible. What we cannot tell you is what the pack contains — we hold no record of the data allowance, validity or hotspot rules on the Orange tourist SIM sold there, so we can price it but not value it.

We also hold no opening hours for the Relay unit and no terminal-level location beyond "arrivals". If you land overnight, treat it as unavailable and plan accordingly.

Queues and the passport rule

Reported waits run about 10 minutes at peak and roughly 3 minutes off-peak. That is fast, and it is not the reason to skip the counter.

Romania requires a passport or national ID to register a prepaid SIM. That is a legal requirement rather than a shop policy, so it applies in Bucharest city stores too, and it is the part of the transaction that actually takes time — the queue figures above sit on top of it. An eSIM bought online skips the registration desk entirely.

Free wi-fi is generally available across the terminal, which is enough to activate an eSIM, book a ride into town, or check public transport times before you leave the building.

EU arrivals: buy nothing

Romania is in the EU. If your usual SIM comes from any EU or EEA country, roam-like-at-home applies and your normal allowance works here at your normal price. Check your operator's roaming fair-use cap and ignore the rest of this page.

That covers a large share of arrivals at OTP, and it is the cheapest advice on the page.

Romania does sell a big bundle after all

An earlier version of this page said Romania's eSIM market tops out at 20GB and that no provider sells a 50GB plan here. That was wrong. Nomad sells 50GB over 30 days for $45, a price now read off its own store, and at $0.90 a gigabyte it is the cheapest data in the country. Airalo's ladder does stop at 20GB, so on Airalo the only step above that is an unlimited plan sold by the day, and those get expensive fast.

Nomad's 50GB row is the best value on the list at $0.90 a gigabyte, with its 20GB at $1.00 just behind and Airalo's 20GB at $1.40, against $4 a gigabyte at the small end. Indicative rows are provider listings we have not re-read at source; the Airalo rows were read from Airalo's own site on 13 August 2026 and the Nomad rows from nomadesim.com on 17 August 2026.

Against that ladder, the Relay store's $13 Orange SIM sits in the same territory as a 5–10GB eSIM. Which one wins depends entirely on the allowance in that pack, and we do not know it.

Which network you get

Holafly lists no carrier for Romania. The Orange, Vodafone and Digi trio this page used to show against it came from our own data rather than from Holafly, so do not pick a plan on that basis. Airalo, Nomad, Saily and Holafly publish no host network for Romania at all — an earlier version of this page also said Saily and Nomad name Orange and Vodafone, and they do not. Airalo's Romanian product is sold under the name Noroc, which is a retail label, not a carrier.

The Relay store is the one case where you know exactly whose network you are on, because it sells an Orange Romania SIM directly. If being on a named network matters for where you are going, that is a real advantage, and it is worth the passport scan.

The verdict

For most visitors, install an eSIM before you fly — no queue, no ID at purchase, live before baggage reclaim. But OTP is not an airport where buying on arrival is a mistake, and if your phone cannot take an eSIM the Relay store is a fair fallback rather than a last resort. Full Romanian pricing and the local-versus-eSIM comparison are on the Romania hub.