Airalo, an eSIM provider founded in Singapore, recently launched Airalo for Business, a platform which allows companies to centralise eSIM connectivity for employees travelling abroad.
“Airalo for Business came about because we saw an increase in the number of corporate travellers – who were already familiar with our services when travelling for their own holidays – use it for their business trips.
“When corporations look at travel, they always look at cost-savings for hotels or flights, and roaming is often the lowest priority. But we’ve seen an uptick in companies wanting to further reduce costs, and they have realised that (roaming charges) can be one of the ways to reduce costs,” explained Melvin Ng, senior director of partnerships (APAC), Airalo, told TTGmice on the sidelines of GBTA APAC Conference.
On the Airalo for Partners platform, companies can purchase multiple eSIM plans and assign them to individual users, set spending limits per employee or department and monitor data consumption in real-time through an analytics dashboard; and consolidate expenses into a single invoice.
According to Ng, Airalo’s plans are more “cost-effective than traditional roaming charges”. Currently, Airalo provides mobile connectivity in over 200 countries and regions, and is used by 500 companies globally, with more coming onboard this year.
On the user’s end, employees will benefit from reliable data access, have more secure connections – as opposed to free public Wi-Fi – and be able to retain their primary phone number of calls and messages. Business travellers who country hop can also easily switch between local data plans.
And as the number of users continue to grow, Ng shared that Airalo has added hundreds of people to the customer support team, to ensure that whenever a user faces any problems, Airalo will be able to obtain help from a human.
“The brand is well known in Europe because that is where travel first started post-Covid (which was around the time eSIMS were increasing in popularity). The penetration in Asia-Pacific is much slower, but we’re making inroads, and have started marketing efforts,” Ng told TTGmice. Such efforts include being present at B2B tradeshows, reaching out to decision-makers on LinkedIn, and ad placements.
Airalo also helps with sustainability reporting by reducing plastic waste, and the carbon footprint associated with the manufacturing and distribution of physical plastic SIM cards.
