A category primed for a breakout
Travel connectivity has been broken for so long that people stopped expecting it to improve. You land, you need a map, a ride, or a message to your hotel, and you immediately start making compromises, airplane mode, rationing data, paying roaming and hoping there is no bill shock later, or queueing for a physical SIM and guessing whether it will even work.
That is why this category behaves differently to most consumer apps. Demand is not something you manufacture with persuasion. Demand is already there, sitting in everyone's muscle memory from the last time they were tired, lost, and offline. The job is not to convince, it is to remove doubt that a solution is real.
Airalo's pitch is straightforward. Use eSIM to eliminate the worst parts of the experience, no physical SIM hunt, prepaid data in advance, and coverage in the places people actually travel. When the experience is designed for the moment of need, growth marketing becomes less about cleverness and more about reliability.
If you want a concrete mechanism, look at the moment a traveller installs an app. They are not browsing with curiosity, they are making a risk decision under time pressure. Anything that reduces perceived risk increases conversion. In this category, product is the message and the message is, "it will work when you need it."
So before we talk channels, the strategic move is to treat travel stress as the acquisition surface. Solve the stressful moment and you unlock a hidden channel that already exists in the market, travellers talking to other travellers about what saved them.
Relief is the real product
It is tempting to describe Airalo as a marketplace for data plans. That description misses the point. The actual product is relief at the exact time people least want a problem.
Relief has two properties that matter for growth. First, it is easy to explain in one sentence. "Download this, pick your destination, and you have data when you land." Second, it is socially transmissible. People share relief because it feels like helping, not selling.
You can see why this matters in how Airalo scaled to more than 20 million travellers across 200+ destinations. In a category where the baseline experience is anxiety, each successful trip is not just retention, it is a story the user can tell. That story travels through family chats, group itineraries, and the small logistics conversations that happen before any flight.
If you are building growth for a utility, steal the sequencing. Put the highest effort into the parts of the journey where failure is punished, arrival day, plan activation, local network switching, and support when something goes wrong. Every prevented failure is future distribution because it avoids refunds, bad reviews, and the "never again" reaction that kills word of mouth.
Airalo also operates in 53 languages and has served users from 230 countries and regions. That is not just localisation for brand polish. It is a way of reducing cognitive load at the moment of stress. When a user can navigate setup in their own language in an airport lounge, you have effectively moved marketing into product design.
Growth teams should treat relief like creative. Not the tagline, the feeling. The product either creates it or it does not, and no amount of copy will compensate if it does not.
The numbers that point to compounding loops
When a startup says growth was "just marketing", the numbers usually reveal something else, spiky acquisition, heavy paid dependency, and churn that quietly forces the same spend every month. Airalo's publicly stated scale reads differently.
They report serving 20 million+ travellers, and the narrative around current velocity includes adding roughly 1 to 1.5 million customers per month. That monthly figure is not consistently confirmed in every dataset, so treat it as directional, but even as a narrative indicator it matters because it implies a machine that keeps working after each trip ends.
You can also triangulate operational credibility. Airalo is reported at 331 employees with 28% employee growth last year, which signals they are still scaling the organisation, not just harvesting a mature product. Estimated annual revenue is cited around $58.9 million, with revenue per employee around $178,000. Those are not the numbers of a hype only story, they are the numbers of a company building a real service business with unit economics that can support continued investment.
Funding is another signal, but only when paired with fundamentals. Airalo has raised a reported $287 million in total, including a $220 million growth round that pushed valuation to unicorn status, over $1 billion, described as $1B as of July 2025. That round included $185 million from CVC via CVC Asia Fund VI, with participation from Peak XV and Antler Elevate.
The practical implication for a growth operator is that Airalo's scale is more consistent with loops than with a single channel. A loop is when each new user increases the probability of the next user arriving cheaper and more convinced. At 20 million users, even small improvements to trust and activation compound into massive absolute growth.
App store gravity as a trust engine
Most teams treat app store reviews as a support metric. In travel connectivity, reviews are closer to a pricing lever because they change conversion at the moment of intent.
Think about when people download a travel eSIM app. It is often the night before a flight, at a gate, or immediately after landing. Users are not doing deep research. They glance at rankings, read a handful of recent reviews, and decide whether they are willing to gamble their first hour in a new country.
Airalo has been positioned as the #1 travel app in mobile app stores in multiple countries. Rankings fluctuate, but the underlying point stands. Strong visibility plus strong social proof creates gravity. You do not need to outspend competitors if you win the trust decision in seconds.
The founder has spoken about consistent app store review strength as a sign of a unicorn. No exact star ratings are required to learn from the mechanism. In a high stakes utility, reviews are not vanity, they are pre sale objections answered by other customers.
A tactic worth copying is to treat review generation as part of the product journey. Ask for reviews after a successful connection event, not after purchase. Route frustrated users to support instead of prompting them to leave a review. Use support transcripts to identify the small reliability issues that create disproportionately angry reviews, activation failures, confusing plan naming, and unclear refund policies.
Also remember the flywheel. Better reliability reduces bad reviews. Better reviews increase conversion. Higher conversion gives you more users and more review volume. More review volume makes it harder for a new entrant to displace you because you have built a defensible trust moat that is visible exactly where people choose.
If you are spending on paid installs while your reviews are mediocre, you are paying a distrust tax. Fix the reviews and the same spend converts better overnight.
Word of mouth designed into travel behaviour
Word of mouth is often described like a lucky outcome. In Airalo's case it looks more like distribution design.
Travel is inherently social. People coordinate in WhatsApp groups, families share flight details, friends send each other links to hotel bookings and itineraries. A product that solves a shared pain in that context spreads with almost no extra prompting because sharing is already part of the behaviour. The founder has explicitly called word of mouth "incredibly powerful" and pointed to sharing patterns in messaging groups. That is exactly what you would predict if the experience is simple and the benefit is immediate.
The key is one sentence recommendability. If a user can explain the product without caveats, the user becomes your sales copy. The moment the explanation requires disclaimers, "it works unless your phone is locked," or "it is fine but support is slow," word of mouth collapses.
This is why coverage breadth and localisation matter as growth levers. Serving 200+ destinations and supporting 53 languages reduces edge cases that create caveats. It also means a broader set of people can be the advocate. In practice, that shifts who markets the product from "tech savvy travellers" to everyone.
If you want a repeatable tactic, build sharing into post purchase moments. After installation, show a lightweight "share with your travel group" prompt that explains the benefit rather than pushing a referral code first. Incentives can help, but in utilities incentives are secondary. The best referral mechanic is simply, "it worked for me when I landed."
The uncomfortable truth is that word of mouth does not start with marketing. It starts with not disappointing people when they are under pressure. Airalo appears to have made that the core of the product, and the channel followed.
Paid acquisition as a tax on distrust
There is a line from Airalo's founder that growth teams should print and stick above the dashboard, he has said he wasted money earlier by overspending on Facebook and Google ads.
That admission matters because it captures a sequencing mistake nearly every team makes at some point. Paid acquisition is not a growth engine, it is an amplifier. If the experience is leaky, paid only buys you more leakage. In travel connectivity, leakage is especially expensive because a single failure can create a refund, a negative review, and a lost cohort of referrals.
The operator lesson is not "never run ads." It is to treat paid as a diagnostic tool and a scaler after trust is earned. A healthy sequence looks like this. First, you drive down activation failure rates. Second, you build a strong review surface. Third, you use paid to capture demand already present, airport searches, destination intent, and last minute installs.
If you do run paid, the creative should not try to be clever. The highest performing message in utilities is often a plain claim that reduces perceived risk, coverage in 200+ destinations, setup in minutes, prepaid and no roaming surprises. Then you back that claim with the trust assets, review snippets, ranking badges, and clear support promises.
A practical way to know whether you are ready for paid is to measure what happens after install. If users install and churn before activation, paid is too early. If users activate but fail in country, your supply and QA are not ready. If users activate and succeed, you can justify spending because you are buying satisfied customers who generate reviews and referrals.
In a world of CAC inflation, the teams that win are not the teams with the best bidding hacks. They are the teams that make paid cheaper over time by making trust compound.
Partnerships that manufacture conversion
Growth marketing people often underweight partnerships because they sound like "business development." In a reliability driven product, partnerships can be the highest leverage growth input because they change the underlying service quality.
Airalo has spoken about supply side partnerships, including a relationship with e& (Etisalat group) described as improving access to affordable rates and broad coverage in markets where the group operates. The exact commercial terms are not public, but the growth mechanism is clear. Better rates allow sharper pricing. Better coverage reduces failure. Fewer failures reduce refunds and negative reviews. Better reviews improve conversion. Conversion plus reliability drives word of mouth.
That is why supply chain is marketing in categories where the service is the product. A telecom partnership is not just margin improvement. It is a way to protect the app store moat, because the easiest way to lose ratings is to have inconsistent performance across countries.
There is also a smart incentive alignment argument that makes these partnerships easier than people assume. Traditional roaming is expensive enough that many travellers simply avoid using data. If a partner helps unlock affordable travel connectivity, the total data volume can expand. The partner can win on price times quantity rather than trying to maximise roaming revenue from a shrinking behaviour.
You can see the broader partnership strategy in their reported 5,000+ partners including travel agents, resellers, and corporates. That is not just distribution. It is also a way to embed Airalo in existing trip planning flows, where the decision is made before the airport panic moment.
If you want to replicate this, stop pitching partners on "exposure." Pitch them on reduced failure rates, incremental volume, and a better customer story. In utilities, the partner who helps you prevent bad experiences is also helping you acquire the next customer.
Business adoption without enterprise theatre
One of the most interesting parts of Airalo's story is how it appears to move from consumer love into organisational policy.
There is a reported anecdote of a CEO of an approximately 450 person company trying Airalo personally and then telling the whole company to adopt it, effectively ending roaming. Treat this as an illustrative story rather than a verified case study, but it matches a pattern we see in the strongest product led businesses. A user solves a personal pain, then exports the solution to their team because they cannot tolerate the old workflow.
Airalo has formalised this with Airalo for Business, positioned around reducing roaming costs by up to 90%. That number is the kind of simple economic hook that finance teams understand immediately. The point is not only savings. It is predictability. Prepaid connectivity turns an unpredictable expense line into something controllable.
The growth advantage is that business adoption can arrive without an enterprise sales theatre. You do not need a long procurement cycle if the product is already trusted by employees and the setup is self serve. You also get a different kind of retention. When a company standardises on a tool for travel, the repeat rate is tied to the travel calendar, not to consumer whims.
From a growth marketing standpoint, the play is to make the consumer experience so clean that it becomes the top of funnel for business. Then add lightweight admin features, basic reporting, policy controls, and support SLAs. The marketing is still the same promise, it works when you land, but now you attach a CFO friendly justification.
If you are building in a similar space, do not force an enterprise motion too early. Earn personal conviction first. When employees start recommending it internally, you have the only lead that really closes, a user who already trusts you.
The uncomfortable future of growth in utilities
Airalo's funding story is a useful counterpoint to the last cycle of startup advice. They reached unicorn status at over $1 billion valuation, described as $1B as of July 2025, after raising a reported $287 million total. The $220 million round led by CVC, including $185 million from CVC Asia Fund VI, is not a small cheque. Investors do not write cheques like that because a team has a clever funnel. They do it because the business looks like it can keep compounding.
What I take from this is a broader view of what "growth marketing" needs to become, especially in utilities. The market is increasingly sceptical of performance spend as a primary strategy. Users have learned to distrust claims. Platforms have become more expensive. In that environment, the winning growth asset is not targeting precision, it is trust density.
Trust density is built through boring excellence, fewer activation bugs, clearer setup, consistent coverage, and support that resolves edge cases fast enough to prevent public backlash. That excellence then becomes visible through app store proof, rankings, and recommendations that travel through groups.
Here is the opinion I am willing to stand behind. In the next five years, the companies that win in travel and other utility categories will look less like ad buyers and more like supply chain operators who understand distribution. They will treat partnerships, QA, and reviews as a single system.
If you are a founder who thinks marketing is the thing you do after the product ships, you are late. In categories where reliability is the product, reliability is the marketing. Airalo's scale suggests that when you get that right, growth stops being a department and becomes a property of the business.
