I'm American, travel some for work and some for leisure and rarely get a sim when traveling alone - usually only when with my husband and we might need to contact each other. I just don't need or want to be in contact all the time and my laptop with hotel wifi will usually be enough. I realize that's my unique situation and most others on this board want/need their phones to work all the time.

We're doing a cruise in the fall. Haven't found an international or pan-Asia sim that will work for all our locations. We're in SIN 5 days so we'll get sims there. Probably not anywhere else. We end in HKG and are spending a couple days there- so a phone provided by the hotel is a nice added bonus for us. Not a necessity, but we'll probably end up using it^