eSIM for Morocco: from the medina's alleys to the Sahara dunes

The old medina of Marrakech is a dense maze of narrow streets with no regular grid, where real-time GPS often points in a direction rather than an exact route: the satellite signal bounces off solid walls and towers, and the blue dot can jump between neighbouring alleys.

The reliable approach is to save landmarks in offline maps beforehand — your riad, the nearest square, a named gate (bab) — and navigate by those rather than by turn-by-turn directions. You'll still want steady data, though: to message your riad's host if you get properly lost, or to call a taxi to the nearest street a car can actually reach. Many riads send guests a detailed text description of the way from the nearest gate — save it in your phone's notes so you're not scrolling through messages to find it.

The road from Marrakech toward Ouarzazate and on to the Sahara crosses the Tizi n'Tichka pass — a high mountain road of sharp switchbacks and constantly changing terrain. Signal holds up over most of the pass, but in some gorges and on tight bends it can drop for a few minutes at a time.

That's not a problem for the driver as long as the route and next waypoint are already loaded into an offline map — a brief signal gap doesn't stop you following a track you've already downloaded. It's also worth marking a couple of cafés and viewpoints along the pass beforehand — that's where people usually stop, and signal there is generally fine even if it briefly dropped on the road itself.

The classic Sahara excursion — a night in a tented camp by the Erg Chebbi dunes near Merzouga — almost always means several hours with no connection: the road itself runs through semi-desert far from any towers, and the camps among the dunes sit even further from the last village with coverage.

If you're on an organised tour, the guide usually mentions this ahead of time — it's worth treating an evening offline as part of the experience rather than a technical problem, and downloading what you'll need beforehand: return transport tickets, bookings for the following nights, and an offline map of the road back.

Casablanca shows up in itineraries more often as a business or transit city — Mohammed V International Airport serves flights from across the region, and the city itself is the country's main economic hub. Coverage here is even and reliable, fine for video calls or email between flights.

Rabat, the capital, is calmer and less touristy than Marrakech, but its network quality matches any of the country's larger cities. For a short business trip covering both, one local plan is enough — no need to switch anything manually between cities.

Ride-hailing apps have caught on in Morocco's bigger cities, but in the medina and more remote areas people more often arrange a ride on the spot — and there, data is more useful for translating and confirming a price than for booking the ride itself.