We took a wee jaunt to the Azores last week. Both me and the missus needed a break after a fairly crappy few years and since our last international travel since the pandemic began was a trip to the Azores we thought “Why not?”.

This was our first trip without having someone else to cover the costs for our cellphones so I did a little research online to see what other travellers were using and found a lot were using airalo which sells data services. My phone, a Pixel 7, supports esims so I figured I’d give that a go. Easy peasy, mostly. I read through the details of how to do the installation and there seemed to be a variety of ways to do it so I opted for the low bother method and used the QR code and let the service handle the installation. I bought 5GB of data really having no idea how much I would use. When we touched down in Ponta Delgada I changed the settings to use the esim for data and away we went. In the end I didn’t use much at all. I think the total usage was something like 717mb over the ten days we were on the island.

We tried a couple of new things this trip as well. First visit to an airport lounge, in this case we used the MasterCard Dragon Pass to visit the lounge at Pearson International prior to our departure. Meh. I found it a bit disappointing to tell you the truth. Not very restful, too much activity, too bright, too noisy. The food was nice but I’d have preferred something less busy. I’m told by a more seasoned traveller friend that the lounges vary from place to place and based on the organization they’re associated with.

On the way back we did another first and paid for upgrades at the gate to get better seats. We flew SATA Azores Airlines on a lovely Airbus A321Neo LR and were seated in row 1. Very nice. Not having a place to stow the cameras was a bit of a bother but whatayagonnado? Excellent service either way. One complaint, not the airlines problem, was the old dude who sat behind us hacking and coughing through the whole flight. Dude, mask up buddy!

Takeaways from the trip? Yes to esims. Definitely an easy solution to the data issue. Meh, maybe not, to the lounge perk unless the conditions were different. Yes to the seat upgrade although figuring out a way to do that without having to shell out more cash would have been good too.