Choosing a VPN for travelSet it up before you leave, not after

Travel is where a VPN earns its subscription, and it is also where people discover their choice was wrong at the worst possible moment. Two problems occur, and they need different things from a provider.

The first is losing access to services from home — banks, government portals, streaming, shopping sites that refuse foreign addresses. The second is the destination itself filtering what you can reach. A provider can be excellent at one and useless at the other.

• Install and sign in before you leave — provider sites are blocked where you need them
• Check the count for your home country, not the provider's country total
• Long routes cost more speed: we measured 40% to 90% surviving
• In filtered countries, obfuscation and a second provider are the difference
• Money-back windows run 7 to 45 days, which makes testing two nearly free

The mistake that ruins the trip

Provider websites are themselves blocked in the countries where you most need one. You cannot sign up, download the app, or recover a password once you have arrived. Every account of "my VPN did not work abroad" that we have read starts here.

The fix is unglamorous and complete: install on every device before you leave, sign in to each one, and open the app once to confirm it connects. Including the tablet you nearly did not bring, and the laptop you assumed you would not use.

Getting back to services from home

This is the easier half. You need an address in your home country, which means checking the count for that country specifically. All seven providers we track publish at least one location in Japan, for example — four of them in two or more cities.

The city count matters more when travelling than at home, because you will hit blocked addresses more often. Banks in particular treat a foreign address as a reason to challenge a login, and a second city gives you another attempt without changing provider.

Reaching things at the destination

This is the harder half and the one that decides which provider you should buy. In countries that filter VPN traffic, the question is not whether the provider has servers but whether its traffic is recognisable. Of the seven we track, five publish a feature list and four of those name obfuscation — traffic shaped to look like ordinary HTTPS.

In those countries, people who live there generally keep two subscriptions from different companies. When one is identified, the other frequently is not. Given the money-back windows, testing two before you leave costs nothing if you cancel the one you do not keep.

What long routes do to speed

Travel means longer routes, and longer routes cost more. Our measurements show the spread: about 90% of the line survived in London, about half in Tokyo, on the same two services in the same week. Connecting from Southeast Asia back to Europe will sit at the lower end of that.

The practical response is to pick the nearest location that serves your purpose rather than the first in the list. If you need a Japanese address and your provider has four Japanese cities, the one nearest you is a different experience from the one the app picked by default.

A checklist for the week before

• Install and sign in on every device. Not just the phone.
• Confirm the country you will need is covered — the count for that country, not the total.
• Note two or three locations that work rather than relying on automatic selection.
• Turn obfuscation on if you are going somewhere that filters, and off afterwards — it costs speed you do not need to pay elsewhere.
• Download offline copies of anything essential. The most reliable connection is the one you do not need.
• Check the current legal position for the destination rather than trusting an article. Rules change with little notice.

How much speed actually survives the tunnel

Every VPN site says a tunnel costs you speed. Almost none of them say how much. We measured it by hand rather than repeating a claim: 14 cities, 46 paired runs, comparing NordVPN and Surfshark against the same raw line in the same session. In the 11 cities where we also measured the bare line, the share that survived the tunnel ranged from 40% to 90%.

Measured by VPN LIFE. Raw-line figures are rounded to the nearest 10 Mbps. Percentages are the share of the raw line that survived.

• 14 cities, 46 paired runs, measured by hand
• 11 of those cities also have the bare line measured
• 40% to 90% of the raw line survived
• We only name a winner in 4 cities — the rest have too few runs

The spread between cities is larger than the spread between providers. In London roughly nine tenths of the line survived on both services; in Tokyo it was closer to half. That is worth knowing before you blame the provider: "this VPN is slow" is usually "this route is slow".

We only call a winner in a city when we have five or more paired runs there and the gap is at least 10%. That threshold is met in 4 of the 14 cities — Tokyo and Los Angeles, where NordVPN averaged ahead, and London and New York, where the two were level. In the remaining ten cities we publish the numbers and say the sample is too small, rather than ranking on one run.

The apps behind our measurements

The providers we track

We rank on what we can check. Each of the five below publishes a location in this use; the tables are our own counts and the providers' own published terms, not a summary of their marketing.

ExpressVPN: the widest spread of cities

ExpressVPN publishes more multi-city countries than anyone else in our set — 11 countries where you can pick between two or more locations, including 56 in the United States, 7 in the United Kingdom, 6 in Australia and 4 in Japan. If your problem is a blocked address rather than a missing country, that spread is the thing that gets you out of it. It is the most expensive option here, and it is the one we would pick for streaming.

ExpressVPN in use

NordVPN: the largest country list, and the one we measured

NordVPN covers more countries than anything else we track. It is also one of the two services we measured ourselves, so the retention figures above are its actual numbers rather than a claim. It operates from Panama, has been audited by Deloitte, allows 10 simultaneous connections, and lists obfuscated servers and a kill switch among its features — the two things that matter where VPN traffic is filtered.

NordVPN in use

Surfshark: unlimited devices, and level with NordVPN in half our tests

Surfshark is the other service in our own measurements. In London and New York it was level with NordVPN; in Tokyo and Los Angeles it trailed by 11% and 17%. It places no limit on simultaneous connections, which makes it the sensible choice for a household rather than a person. Audited by Deloitte, operating from the Netherlands, with Camouflage Mode for networks that filter VPN traffic.

Surfshark in use

CyberGhost: the longest money-back window, with a catch

CyberGhost's 45-day money-back guarantee is the longest here, and it is the reason it appears on most lists. Read the condition: 45 days applies to the six-month and two-year plans, and the monthly plan gets 14 days. It publishes 10 multi-city countries, with 11 locations in the United States, but only a single city in Japan — so it is a weaker choice if Japanese services are your target.

CyberGhost in use

Private Internet Access: unlimited connections, US jurisdiction

PIA places no limit on devices and publishes an Advanced Kill Switch, obfuscation, multi-hop and port forwarding. Its no-logs claim has been audited by Deloitte Audit Romania. The trade-off is jurisdiction: it operates from the United States, which some readers will rule out on principle. We list it because the rest of the record is strong and because it is one of only four providers with two or more cities in Japan.

Private Internet Access in use

Frequently asked questions

Will it slow my connection down?

Yes, and we have measured how much: across 14 cities and 46 paired runs, between 40% and 90% of the raw line survived the tunnel. The variation between cities is wider than the variation between providers — London kept about 90% on both services we tested, Tokyo about half. If a VPN feels slow, the route is a more likely explanation than the provider.

Can I use a free VPN for this?

Usually not, and the reason is measurable rather than moral. Even on paid services we measured, between 10% and 60% of the raw line disappears into the tunnel — in Tokyo a 780 Mbps line came out at roughly half. Free tiers add a data cap and a much smaller server list on top of that. They also have to earn money somewhere, and where the product is free the revenue usually comes from the traffic itself.

Should I leave it on the whole trip?

For anything on a public network, yes — that is the case where it applies every day. Turn it off for things that work better locally, such as maps and local payment apps, which frequently behave oddly when your address says you are on another continent.

Will my bank block me for using one?

Banks challenge unfamiliar addresses, and a VPN address is unfamiliar. Connecting through your home country makes the address look normal again, which is usually the point of using one for banking while abroad rather than a risk of it.

Conclusion

Set it up before you fly, check the count for the country you need rather than the total, and take a second provider to anywhere that filters. Those three cover almost every failure we have seen described.

The per-country counts and the speed measurements are ours, collected daily and published in full.

Every figure on this page comes from our own daily collection or our own measurements. The files are published as open data under CC BY 4.0, and the method — including what the numbers do not prove — is on how we test.