Rogers, Bell and Telus cover British Columbia, and your eSIM will use one of them. Our Vancouver guide covers the city - SkyTrain payments, hiking coverage and the drive to Whistler - and our Alberta and Calgary guides cover the Rockies on the other side of the divide. This guide is about the rest of the province, which is enormous, and about the thing that governs travel here more than roads do: a large part of British Columbia is only reachable by boat.
BC Ferries is one of the largest ferry operators in the world, running dozens of vessels across an enormous coastal network.
Vancouver Island is not connected by bridge. Victoria, Nanaimo, Tofino and everything else on an island larger than Belgium are reached by ferry or by air, and there is no other option.
The Gulf Islands - Salt Spring, Galiano, Mayne, Pender - are the same, and inter-island sailings are infrequent enough that a missed one costs you half a day.
Reserve, especially with a vehicle. Summer sailings on the main Vancouver-to-Victoria and Vancouver-to-Nanaimo routes sell out, and turning up hoping for space is how people lose an afternoon in a holding lane.
Foot passengers rarely need to book on the major routes, but you then need transport at the far end.
Build in slack. Sailings are cancelled for weather, mechanical issues and crew shortages, and the schedule is the schedule - there is no next one in ten minutes.
The Inside Passage sailing north to Prince Rupert is a fifteen-hour daylight journey through fjords and is one of the great ferry rides anywhere. It runs seasonally and books early.
Float planes are a genuine alternative rather than a novelty - Vancouver harbour to Victoria harbour in 35 minutes, and they are how a lot of business travel is done.
British Columbia is around 950,000 square kilometres - larger than France and Germany combined, and about four times the size of the United Kingdom.
Distances are correspondingly serious. Vancouver to Prince George is around eight hours by road. Vancouver to Tofino is five to six hours including a ferry. Vancouver to Prince Rupert is well over a day.
And a great deal of it is empty. Most of the population lives in the southwest corner, and the north and centre have very few people and very long gaps between towns.
Which is a coverage problem. Highway corridors are covered; the spaces between them frequently are not. On Highway 16 and Highway 97 you can drive for long stretches without service.
Fuel and services are sparse on those routes. Fill up when you can rather than when you need to.
Tell someone your route if you are driving the north or the interior alone. This is standard practice here rather than excessive caution.
British Columbia has severe wildfire seasons, and the province has had several of its worst on record in recent years.
The practical effect is usually smoke rather than flames. Fires hundreds of kilometres away can fill the Okanagan and the interior valleys with smoke for days, turning air quality poor and removing the mountain views entirely.
Highways close. The Coquihalla, Highway 97 and others have been shut at short notice for fires and, in 2021, for catastrophic flooding and landslides that severed the province's road links for weeks.
Alert Ready broadcasts to phones on a Canadian network, including roaming ones, and it is used for evacuation orders. Leave emergency alerts enabled.
Check DriveBC before any long drive in summer - it publishes closures, and it is what everyone here uses.
Campfire bans are common and enforced, and they are announced regionally.
July to September is the season, and it is also the best weather - which is the tension of a BC summer.
The southwest corner is well covered - Vancouver, Victoria, the Fraser Valley, the Sea-to-Sky corridor to Whistler.
Vancouver Island's west coast is the notable gap. The road to Tofino crosses the island through mountains with long dead stretches, and the surf beaches themselves are covered around the towns and not much beyond.
The Gulf Islands vary considerably - Salt Spring is fine, the smaller ones are patchy.
The interior highways north of Kamloops thin badly.
The Kootenays and the Cariboo have large gaps.
On the ferries, coverage holds near shore and fades in the middle of the larger crossings.
In the provincial parks - Garibaldi, Strathcona, the backcountry generally - assume nothing. As in Alberta, a phone is not a safety device here; people carry satellite messengers.
Tofino and the west coast of Vancouver Island receive several metres of rain a year - among the wettest places in North America.
Storm watching is a legitimate winter activity, and hotels sell packages for it. People come specifically to watch the Pacific throw itself at the shore in January.
Vancouver's reputation for rain is earned but overstated relative to the island's west coast, which is a different order of wet.
The interior is the opposite. The Okanagan is semi-arid, grows wine and peaches, and is hot and dry in summer - two hundred kilometres and a mountain range from rainforest.
Pack for both if you are crossing the province, because you will experience genuinely different climates in the same week.
- BC Ferries, for reservations, sailing status and the current wait at terminals. This is the single most useful app here.
- DriveBC, for highway closures, which matter more than you would expect.
- Maps with offline copies for the island, the interior and anything north.
- Alert Ready works without an app - it is cell broadcast - but leave alerts enabled.
- Uber and Lyft operate in Vancouver and in a growing number of other centres, and not everywhere.
Vancouver International (YVR) is the main gateway and one of the better-regarded airports in North America.
Victoria (YYJ) and Kelowna (YLW) take domestic and some US flights.
By ferry from Washington State - Anacortes to Sidney, and the Victoria Clipper from Seattle - is a scenic alternative.
Hire a car for anything outside Vancouver and Victoria. Public transport between regions is limited; the province is built around driving and flying.
Canada is a separate roaming zone from the United States, so a trip combining Seattle and Vancouver needs a plan covering both.
Less than you would think in absolute terms, because so much of the province has no service at all. What matters is preparation: offline maps for every leg, ferry reservations made in advance, and DriveBC checked before you set off. Budget for the days in Vancouver and Victoria when you are actually online.
Waterproofs, genuinely. A proper shell, not a fashion raincoat, particularly on the coast and the island.
Layers, because coastal, interior and mountain weather are three different problems.
Hiking boots for anything beyond a town.
Warm layers even in summer - mountain evenings and the open deck of a ferry are cold.
Sun protection, which people forget in a place they associate with rain; the interior in July is hot and exposed.
Nothing formal anywhere. BC dresses down to a degree that visitors from elsewhere find startling.
A ferry crossing the Salish Sea at golden hour, islands and mountains stacked behind each other.
Tofino's Long Beach in a winter storm, or in summer with the surfers out.
The Sea-to-Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler, which is one of the great coastal drives.
Joffre Lakes, three stacked glacial lakes north of Pemberton - note that access is periodically restricted, including for Indigenous cultural closures, so check before going.
Okanagan vineyards above the lake at Naramata.
The Inside Passage, from the deck, on the sailing to Prince Rupert.
Emerald Lake and Yoho, on the BC side of the Rockies before you cross into Alberta.
Victoria's Inner Harbour, with the float planes landing in front of the Parliament buildings.
British Columbia is larger than France and Germany combined, and about four times the size of the United Kingdom, with about five and a half million people in it.
Vancouver Island is bigger than Belgium and has no bridge to the mainland - every vehicle on it arrived by ferry.
The Great Bear Rainforest on the central coast is the largest intact temperate rainforest on earth, and it is home to the Kermode or spirit bear, a black bear with a recessive gene that makes it cream-coloured.
Tofino gets several metres of rain a year, and people book winter holidays there specifically to watch storms.
BC Ferries carries tens of millions of passengers a year and functions as a highway rather than a cruise operator, which is why locals talk about sailings the way other people talk about traffic.
And the province has more coastline than you can easily imagine - tens of thousands of kilometres once the islands and inlets are counted.
Summer, July and August, which is peak season for everything and also peak wildfire season.
Whale migration, with grey whales passing Vancouver Island in spring and resident orcas through the summer.
The Okanagan wine harvest, in September and October.
Ski season, December to April, at Whistler Blackcomb, Big White, Revelstoke and Sun Peaks.
Storm season on the west coast, November to February, which is a genuine tourist draw.
September is arguably the best month: warm, quieter, past the worst of the fire season and with the interior at its best.
The love: British Columbia has the most varied landscape of any Canadian province - rainforest, fjords, desert, alpine and a coastline of tens of thousands of kilometres - and the infrastructure to reach a great deal of it. The ferries are transport and sightseeing at once, Vancouver Island is a destination in its own right, the Okanagan makes serious wine, and the wildlife - whales, bears, eagles - is genuinely abundant rather than a marketing promise.
The complaints are consistent. The distances defeat people who planned by the map. Ferries add cost and rigidity to every island itinerary. It rains, a great deal, on the coast. Wildfire smoke can erase the views for a week in high summer. It is expensive, particularly accommodation in season. And cell coverage disappears far more comprehensively than most visitors from Europe expect.
Come in September, book your ferries before anything else, download offline maps for every leg, and give Vancouver Island more days than you first allocated.
With a vehicle in summer, yes - the main Vancouver to Victoria and Nanaimo sailings sell out and there is no alternative route, because Vancouver Island has no bridge. Foot passengers usually manage without a reservation on the major routes but then need transport at the far end. Build slack in: sailings are cancelled for weather and crew shortages.
Outside the southwest corner, frequently. The road across Vancouver Island to Tofino has long dead stretches, the interior highways north of Kamloops thin badly, and the provincial backcountry has nothing. Download offline maps for every leg and treat a phone as a convenience rather than a safety device - people here carry satellite messengers.
In a bad summer, bad enough to remove the mountains from view for days and make air quality genuinely poor, from fires hundreds of kilometres away. Highways also close at short notice. Check DriveBC before long drives, and leave Alert Ready enabled - it broadcasts evacuation orders to roaming phones.
No - Canada and the US are separate roaming zones on almost every plan. If your trip pairs Vancouver with Seattle, check that yours covers both before you cross.
