Taking a cruise means leaving the real world behind. Once your ship sails, you can put your phone down and just be on vacation for the duration of your trip.
This is certainly how some people approach their travels, but many simply cannot do it. You might want to take a cruise to escape reality, but the worries of work and family don’t disappear just because you’re on vacation.
Some people can’t leave the world behind on a cruise and others just don’t want to. For some passengers, keeping in touch with those left behind on the ground is essential, and others simply don’t want to be disconnected.
If you want (or need) to stay connected to your land life while at sea, you need to buy an internet package. Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) sells three Internet plans on its namesake cruise line:
- sOciaL: $8.50 per person per day, which allows you to text and check social media,
- Value: $11.05 per person per day provides access to social media, email and web, but not streaming sites.
- Premium: $14.45 per person per day in theory gives passengers access to full internet including streaming.
To say that internet on board is a mixed experience is an understatement. Prices vary by cruise, and performance varies greatly based on the number of people on board using the Internet as well as other factors. Even the top pack can be almost useless on sea days when many people are trying to use it.
But now, the cruise line has taken some steps to improve the internet experience for passengers.
Image source: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Carnival increases its internet bandwidth
Carnival’s main rival, Royal Caribbean (RCL) , has added Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink Internet to one of its ships, Freedom of the Seas. This is just a test at the moment, but it has transformed the internet experience on that ship from barely functional to something akin to working from a Starbucks (SEX) .
Royal Caribbean has not said whether it plans to bring Starlink to more ships, but the move seems imminent.
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Carnival has taken various steps to improve its Internet, according to Vice President Luis Terife, Cruise Industry News reported.
“We’ve seen significant growth in guest usage, across the board, but particularly with a greater emphasis on our premium plans,” he said. “We’re adapting to visitor usage patterns allowing for a more balanced upload vs. download experience.”
The cruise line has “enhanced its connectivity ecosystem by leveraging bandwidth from multiple satellite providers to remain flexible, which is key to delivering a consistent connected experience to ships moving between deployment regions,” it explained Vice President of Global Infrastructure John Harshaw.
“We’ve deployed significantly more WiFi access points across our fleet, so our guests and crew can connect seamlessly in many places on board,” he said, adding that the upgrades also increased automation and redundancy within the connectivity ecosystem to reduced single points of failure.
That’s a lot of fancy words to say that Carnival has made changes to improve the internet experience on board.
Carnival makes other changes online
The cruise line has also followed Royal Caribbean by giving crew members free access to Whatsapp (META) so they can keep in touch with friends and family back home as well as other crew members.
People who work aboard cruise ships, at least on Carnival and Royal Caribbean ships. pay for internet access as passengers do.
Since returning from their pandemic shutdowns, both Carnival and Royal Caribbean have pushed more onboard activities to their apps. They include enabling passengers to make reservations, keep in touch with other passengers and pull up menus with QR codes.
In turn, these activities have put added stress on the already fragile internet networks on board. Carnival has acknowledged the issue and continues to work on the problem.
“With short-term capacity spanning all ocean regions, all global (connectivity) providers are working hard to build larger and more scalable networks, and this will only improve the overall connectivity experience at sea ,” Harshaw told Cruise Industry News.
