We’ve already shown you how to build your own VPN server on a $5-a-month VPS with WireGuard, and how to turn a GL.iNet travel router into a one-login VPN for every device in your bag. Both guides assume you’re willing to spend an evening configuring something. Most travelers aren’t — they want to open an app, tap connect, and get on with their trip. That’s the gap a commercial service like NordVPN is built to fill, and it’s worth looking at honestly: what it actually does, what it costs this month, and where it falls short of the DIY option.

Nord Security — the company behind NordVPN, NordPass, and NordLocker — launched its own eSIM app, Saily, in 2024. It’s an odd pivot for a privacy-software company, but two years in, Saily has become a real competitor to Airalo, the eSIM marketplace Traroro covered in its broader eSIM explainer. Saily now covers over 200 countries and regions, holds a 4.7-star rating across tens of thousands of App Store and Google Play reviews, and bundles its parent company’s ad- and malware-blocking tools in for free rather than selling them separately. Here’s what it actually offers, what it costs as of November 2026, and where it genuinely wins or loses against Airalo.

Belgium rewards a tight itinerary better than almost anywhere else in Europe — Brussels, Ghent, and Bruges sit close enough together that you can stand in a medieval cloth hall at breakfast and a Gothic belfry by dinner. Two days isn’t enough to linger, but it’s enough to see why this stretch of Flanders produced some of the most contested, most stolen, and most quietly rebuilt art and architecture on the continent: a cathedral painting with a missing panel the police never closed the case on, a city square the French burned to rubble and the guilds rebuilt out of spite, and a Michelangelo that ended up hidden in an Austrian salt mine.