How to pay for Internet on a cruise?

[TooBigForMyBoots]

Me and the DC are going on a European cruise this summer. WIFI costs £30 per day on the boat.

Can anyone recommend a cheaper option?

There's no alternative and connection at sea is patchy at best, save your money & just wait til you're in port.

If cost more on the cruise ship.

You might want to book it on Sea days!

If you can develop T1 diabetes before the trip, and your cruise is with P&O, and you need wifi to look up nutritional information or to send glucose alerts to someone elses phone then the wifi is completely refunded.

That's the cheapest option, but you'd have to keep the T1 diabetes for life i'm afraid, so depends how much you want the wifi really.

If it’s the Med, you often get 4/5G for a while when you’re near the coast. It’s when you’re right out at sea, it’s cruise WiFi or nothing. Watch out for your provider’s roaming costs, though.

There is no hidden cheaper option, unless you get some kind of upgrade with a bundle, but even then, WiFi is the last thing they add for free. You can maybe wait until you get to port and use your roaming data, maybe with an EU roaming package. On a European cruise you will rarely have more than one full "sea day".

Also, be very careful about leaving your mobile data on when the ship sails. Sometimes, as soon as you get clear of land, the ship turns on a "Maritime Phone Services" antenna which is basically a satellite phone service, and it comes with data that costs a fortune (€10 a megabyte or something ludicrous). If that's the only signal it can see, your phone will roam to it. The EU makes providers send a warning at €40, and at €60 it blocks unless you explicitly lift it, but post-Brexit I don't know if this still applies to UK networks. And you can hit €40 in just a few minutes without actually using your phone because of all the background chatter that your apps are doing. (And for goodness sake don't answer the phone if it rings while you're on this service, because that costs several pounds per minute too.)

So always, always turn off mobile data before the ship sails. Better still, put the phone into airplane mode. (Don't just turn it off, though. I did that once, and then when I turned it back on when we hadn't quite docked yet, boom, "Welcome to Maritime Services" as soon as it went looking for a signal. So if you do turn it off, make sure it's in airplane mode first.)

Thank you all for your advice. I'll check our Roaming Packages and keep DS1 off his phone until he sets foot on land.

It can be a case of logging into your cruise account and checking prices. That’s what we do anyway. Sometimes a deal will come up, other times no. I think also it depends on how many sea days you have. We are always port intensive so it’s only while the ship is sailing that we don’t have internet.

Depending on the cruise line, but with Royal Caribbean it is cheaper to have one person pay for multiple devices than several people pay for one device. The coverage on our ship last year was excellent. We keep our 3g/4g on because we need it on shore, on previous cruises we found it worked so long as you were in sight of land but watch out if you go near anywhere outside the EU eg Turkey as the roamimg charges are a lot higher. We've never had the maritime thing try to kick in, maybe it depends on your provider.

I've been on a couple of cruises and WiFi is expensive and sometimes not very good.
I didn't use my phone until we got into ports then turned my roaming on, bought it in advance.
Dp had also bought a "bundle" and I used his hotspot when we were at sea for two days but we were near the coastline, just to let DD know we were still alive.
There's plenty to do on board for DC but I found it's those quiet times that I missed my phone, first thing in the morning and last thing at night when I'd usually scroll my phone.

Which one did you use? I used gigsky, it was good and cheaper than the cruise wifi. I mainly used it for socials and some light browsing. Just make sure to check the list of cruise lines gigsky supports.

Do you actually NEED to use it?
(On holiday my phone is OFF)

We took the hit with the added WiFi for a cruise booked for next year. Myself and DH would have managed fine without it but having a teenage DC it would have made the holiday miserable if they didn't have access to tiktok and instagram🤣