On 1 May 2025, Air Canada switched on free Wi-Fi for Aeroplan members on its flights across North America and to the Sun destinations in Mexico and the Caribbean. The airline’s announcement said the connection was quick enough for streaming video and gaming. Bell, which sponsors the service, had covered free onboard texting for Aeroplan members since May 2023.
It was one airline’s news, but it says a lot about where a traveller’s downtime goes now. Most of it goes to a screen. Long flights, overnight trains, wet afternoons in a guesthouse and the dead hour before checkout get filled with shows, podcasts, games and apps, the same ones people use at home.
The road changes how those apps behave, though. Some of it is plain physics, like battery life and bandwidth. A surprising amount is legal. Rights deals and roaming rules both stop at borders, which is why the film menu in a Rome hotel can look quite different from the one on the sofa at home.
Free airline Wi-Fi hasn’t made the download folder obsolete
Air Canada’s own release was frank about the limits. Free streaming-quality Wi-Fi covered North America and the Sun routes, and the airline said international flights would get it in 2026. Until then, Aeroplan members on international routes got free texting. The release didn’t name a month for the long-haul rollout, so anyone on a transatlantic flight late in 2026 still has to check what their aircraft actually carries.
So the download folder survives. Netflix’s help pages put the ceiling at 100 active downloads per device on its ad-free plans. Ad-supported plans get 15 downloads per device per calendar month, which sounds generous until you count the episodes of one series across a two-week trip with a couple of long flights in it.
Downloads also come with a clock. Netflix says they expire after a period of time, and some titles can only be downloaded a limited number of times a year. Its help page for travellers adds that titles downloaded at home may not be available in a different country. Either problem can surface mid-flight, with no signal to fix it.
The fix is dull and it works. Refresh the folder on hotel or home Wi-Fi the night before you fly and delete what you’ve already watched. Anything the onboard Wi-Fi adds after that is extra.
An hour of podcast uses a sliver of the data an hour of video does
Audio is the lightest thing a traveller carries. Spotify says its podcasts stream at roughly 96 kbit/s on phones and tablets, which works out to something like 43 MB an hour. Netflix, by its own figures, can use up to 3 GB an hour in high definition. On those numbers, an hour of HD video costs about 70 times the data of an hour of podcast.
On a capped eSIM, or a hotel connection shared by a whole floor of guests, that gap decides what you can use. A podcast will keep playing on a connection that turns video into a spinning wheel. It also leaves your eyes free, which counts for more than it sounds on a night bus or a winding coastal road.
Downloading audio is easy too. Spotify’s free tier lets you save podcasts for offline listening, while albums and playlists need Premium, which allows up to 10,000 tracks on each of up to five devices. Audiobook apps behave the same way once a title is saved to the phone.
One condition needs planning around. Spotify wants each device online at least once every 30 days, or the downloads can disappear; the company says the check-in lets it collect play data and pay artists. A month of trekking without signal needs a reconnect somewhere along the way, even a short one in a café.
Handheld consoles run out of battery long before they run out of borders
Games are the most self-contained entertainment you can pack. A single-player game that’s already on the device doesn’t care which country the plane is over, and it doesn’t need a signal. What it needs is power. Nintendo rates the Switch 2’s battery at about 2 to 6.5 hours, calls those rough estimates that depend on the game, and says a full charge takes around three hours in sleep mode.
So the real limit on a long-haul day is the socket. Demanding games sit at the bottom of that range, and a 13-hour flight would outlast even the top estimate twice over. A power bank tends to earn its space in a carry-on more than a second game does.
The console has gaps as a travel screen, though. This blog’s guide to the Switch 2 on flights points out that you can’t download Netflix, Disney+ or Prime Video on the Switch. Anyone who wants films offline ends up packing a phone or tablet as well.
Phone games fill the gap for people who’d rather not carry a console. Plenty of them run offline, but many free-to-play titles check in with a server before they’ll load, and multiplayer modes need a live connection, which hands them straight back to the hotel Wi-Fi.
EU roaming rules run to 2032 and stop at the UK
Data abroad used to be the cost that shaped every other choice. Inside the EU it mostly isn’t. The current roaming regulation, signed in Strasbourg on 6 April 2022, extended Roam Like At Home for ten years and is set to expire on 30 June 2032.
The European Commission says the scheme covers all 27 member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, and it reached Ukraine and Moldova on 1 January 2026. Since July 2022 the rules have also asked operators to match home quality abroad, 5G included, wherever the local network makes that technically possible.
The edge of that zone is Britain. Since the UK left the EU, the Commission says, the regime doesn’t apply on trips there, although some operators chose to keep the benefit anyway. Its advice is blunt. Check with your operator before you travel to the UK.
For a Canadian or an American landing in Europe, none of this applies to a home contract. Their costs come down to their own carrier’s roaming plans, and a prepaid travel eSIM can work out cheaper on a long trip. Cheap data at the destination makes streaming abroad look easy, right up until the catalogue changes.
Streaming catalogues follow rights deals, with one EU exception
Open Netflix in another country and the rows change. Netflix’s help centre gives the reason. It can’t get a title’s rights for a region if nobody is selling them or another service holds them exclusively, and more than one studio or distributor may own the same film in different places. Its own example is a movie it can show in Latin America before it reaches the United States or Canada.
The EU wrote an exception into law. Regulation 2017/1128 on cross-border portability, which has applied since 2018, requires paid online content services to give subscribers who are temporarily in another member state the same access they get at home. A Parisian spending a week in Lisbon keeps the French catalogue, and the provider can’t add a charge for it.
Britain sits outside it now. UK government guidance on portability says the regulation no longer applies to UK and EEA travel and has been revoked in the UK. Providers can still offer British customers their home catalogue abroad if rights holders agree, but they aren’t obliged to.
Outside that EU arrangement, Netflix’s help page for travellers says the choice of shows and films varies by country, and titles in Continue Watching may not be available. A Toronto subscriber who opens the app in a Madrid hotel can find that the series they were halfway through has gone.
Live-dealer tables are broadcast like TV but restrict who may bet
Streams with money attached are stricter again. A live-dealer casino table is filmed and broadcast much like a studio programme, with cameras trained on a real table. The difference is in the paperwork. A gambling operator’s licence and its terms decide who may place a bet at all, which is a harder line than a film catalogue that simply shows different titles.
A live HD stream from a staffed studio, kept running 24 hours a day, sits behind every table in the lobby of Shuffle’s live crypto casino. That page names Evolution and Pragmatic Play Live as the studios and says real dealers run the games. By its account, the card leaving the shoe or the pocket where the ball stops decides the main result, with no random number generator involved.
Shuffle’s terms check where a player lives as well as where they are. Under those terms a home in the UK or the US rules a person out, and so does simply being in either country, whatever passport they hold. The list doesn’t stop at those two countries either, and it ends with wording that covers places whose laws don’t allow the service at all.
A live table is also the only stream in this piece where the viewer stakes money on what happens in the picture. The house holds an edge on every game in that lobby. Results lurch from round to round, yet a player who keeps betting should expect to lose money over time.
Offline maps have borders and expiry dates of their own
The apps that keep a trip running have the same quirks as the ones that fill it. Google’s Android help page for Maps says offline maps can’t be downloaded in some countries or regions at all, and it names contractual limitations, language support and address formats among the reasons.
The maps you can save don’t last forever either. They expire, and Google says Maps tries to update an area by itself once it’s 15 days or less from expiry and the phone is on Wi-Fi.
So an area saved long before a trip can lapse on the road if the phone hasn’t been on Wi-Fi in the fortnight before it expires. In some countries, there was never a download button to press. Ten minutes with each app before departure turns up both problems. The habit worth keeping is to know which of your apps change with the border before you cross it.
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