Phone Saving Secrets for Your Next Cruise

hey everyone today we're going to talk all about using your cell phone on a cruise ship now you may not be thrilled about that and some people may just think you should put your phone away but if you don't think that come along let's check it [Music] out hey everyone John here from bite siiz cruises welcome back to the channel if it's your first time here we are a travel agency trying to give you some great information about cruising so you can plan to go on an amazing Cruise vacation today we're talking all about using your cell phone on a cruise are there people out there that think you should lock your phone up in the safe and not touch it because you're on vacation yes however I'm not always on vacation sometimes I'm working on cruises I'm there to check things out to make recommendations to clients to just you know explore the ship do a tour do different things so I definitely need to use my phone I need to use my laptop top a lot to get some work done I also have elderly parents so even if I am on vacation I need to have contact with the outside world it's 2024 I think most people at this point in our lives we kind of feel that cord and we have to be connected um we don't always want that it's not always the best for our mental health and everything else but most of us do need at some point some type of connection to the outside world uh I know when I was a kid we used to just go out for the day I didn't have a cell phone my parents couldn't get a hold of me if I was going to be 10 minutes late I was going to be an hour late cuz what are they going to do they can't find me so uh but anyway if you don't want to use your cell phone during the cruise I completely understand I know that it's better to be kind of shut down and enjoy yourself on vacation by all means put your phone in airplane mode or just throw it in your safe and shut it off good for you if you could do that I applaud you if you can actually do that but let's talk about the people who cannot do that so if you cannot afford to do that that you basically have two options you can leave your phone on which probably isn't the best option or you could turn wi uh you could turn it into airplane mode which will shut down your cellular service so first of all let's talk about that real quick if you do that you could still connect to the ship's Wi-Fi most of the cruise lines if not all will allow you connect to the Wi-Fi and allow you to use the app over Wii if you don't want to use the app and you don't want to connect you don't have to you can just put in airplane mode carry your phone around if you just want to have the time or feel normal uh you could certainly do that or again you could throw it in your safe and not have to worry about it at all next up if you decide to leave your phone off of not on airplane mode but just open and running you're going to run into some problems so one you will start once you hit about 12 to 15 miles outside of land you are going to start getting warnings and racking up charg for roaming now let's talk about it a little bit there are no cell towers out at Sea right there is no uh the ship's not pulling a cord back to the island or any of the your home countries so that you can get uh cellular service it's all based on satellites when you get out into the ocean and those satellites there are a few companies like cellular ity which is the big one that will charge you for those Services they're actually going to charge you through your provider which would be AT&T Verizon T-Mobile so if you go to each of those websites it'll tell you how much those charges are going to be uh you can look at each one of those each one is different just search seller at C you can go to their website it'll direct you back to your provider for pricing now some crew some uh providers do have Cruise plans I use AT&T at the time of this recording they have two plans they have a $60 plan which is for your cruise and then they have a $100 plan again for your cruise you have to put in your ship and sale date and it's good for 30 days so the $60 plan's going to give you 100 Megs of data and it's going to give you unlimited talk and text 100 Megs of data is nothing so you can burn through that I can burn through that in a couple minutes going through my email or just checking social media doing that kind of stuff so careful there um the $100 plan gives you a gig of data again I'll go through that very quickly probably in a few hours or a day if I'm on to cruise um and then after that that you start racking up charges at $10 per 100 Megs if you're on a cruise and you don't shut your data off that's going to be a massive charge so I don't think that's the best idea yet I still don't think that's you know evolved to the point where that's a good idea so I would put your phone in airplane mode while you're sailing while you're on a cruise let's get that out of the way now let's talk about your options when you are at Port we're going to come back and talk about Wi-Fi in a few minutes but while you were at Port the amazing thing now is with cell service in most countries around the world you are going to have service available to you now do you have to pay for that probably so let's talk about the the big three here AT&T Verizon and T-Mobile if you have AT&T there are $10 International passes I usually do that if you are in like the Bahamas or you're somewhere if you are in certain places it's just considered part of your plan like Canada and Mexico are a good example of sometimes that's just included in your plan again please go to your provider's website look up the data for your International pass mineus $10 a day and after you do 10 of those in a month the rest are free so if you're traveling for like a month you're going to pay a maximum of $100 extra and then you'll get all those for free so I do that all the time when I'm in foreign countries so that I just pop it on I know it's going to be 10 bucks generally it's one or two stops I turn my phone on uh while I'm out at Port so that I can check my email do all those other things it's way faster you'll find like just using your phone is quicker than being on the ship in normal circumstances so that is something you could do Verizon also has uh travel passes they are also $10 very similar check them in some of their plans for Verizon again Canada and Mexico are just included in your plan so keep an eye on that because that'll help you out a lot if you are sailing up to Canada or down to Mexico which a lot of cruises go to next up uh T-mobile shockingly includes International I was blown away so if you are on like the 5G next or Plus plans they do include your uh International in that you don't have to pay any extra that's pretty amazing that would actually make me I'm not going to do it it would make me think about using T-Mobile for the love of God T-Mobile is not great in Philadelphia where I'm at which is why it might be great wherever you are um so most people here have AT&T L Verizon so those are options when you're sailing to different ports same thing with Europe and everything you'll have that connection you can get those International Day passes if you are in Europe you can also look into getting a sim a lot of people do that I don't love that idea of getting a Sim putting it in your card like a prepaid sim and using it I'd rather just use my service and get an international plan look if you're going to Europe for weeks not on a cruise just going to Europe that's something you should look into to or just getting a a burner phone while you're over there something to use so those are options for cellular service now let's talk about Wi-Fi Wi-Fi continues to get better and better on cruises as of two to three years ago I would have told you that the cruise Internet is just awful we were barely able to work I was barely able to check my email and like text and call my parents at a barely barely barely I could do that now those things work pretty well email I have no issues with you know sometimes if I get a big file or something it takes a little while to download but for the most part my email works flawlessly my texting it's still a little bit Hit or Miss uh but it works pretty well pictures and stuff do not work very well uh but again you could use services like WhatsApp and things like that and that'll be very smooth they work very well over Wi-Fi so I highly recommend that if you're looking for something uh to use we use Slack in work that works really well over Wi-Fi and then basic web browsing works really well anything else if even if you're paying for the higher levels of service like streaming watching something on Netflix or like YouTube TV or something it's not going to be perfect it's going to be a little bit choppy and I just don't recommend that I don't think it's a great experience you're still better off downloading some shows or downloading some things you want to watch uh before you go and not trying to stream it's not it's just not the best experience still however it is Leaps and Bounds better than it was even a few years ago even as of last year I would have told you like Royal and celebrity were really good and then Norwegian and Carnival and some of those other ones were still a little choppy they're all pretty much the same now I've been on three or four Norwegian ships in the past few months the internet was very stable little drops Norwegian still drops more than others uh MSC very good Carnival very good Royal's still kind of The Benchmark at this point but they're all very very very good ver excellent so and virgins is included in your cruise Fair something you should know so virgin thinks that Wi-Fi is a basic human right so they give it to you as part of your cruise Fair again you're paying for it it's just they're not charging you a afterwards for it it's included in your Cruis fair so with Norwegian Royal Carnival and all the other big Cruise Lines you are going to pay somewhere between $15 and $30 per day based on if you're getting like just social media uh or browsing or streaming that's what it is right now is some of them it's going up more uh some of them you can get a good deal depending on when it is Royal has Flex pricing so you really never know what you're going to get but the internet and the Wi-Fi does work very well on all of the ships I know some people are going to say I was on this ship and it wasn't great yes there are still bad experiences not every ship's great and remember they're using satellite technology if you're going through a hurricane it's not going to be great if there if the network is saturated for some reason if there's a lot of things connected to the network whether it be 10 ships in the area which I know that's not going to happen but there are things too that can saturate the network and your connection may drop or be slow coming in and out of port sometimes I find that it's choppy or slow it's far from perfect but it's much better than it was so if you would like to stay connected while you are on your cruise those are your options for you if anybody has any questions if I missed anything which I'm sure I did please let me know in the comments below hope you enjoyed this video if you did please throw it a like And subscribe to our Channel we put out a brand new Cruise video every single day and we do a live stream Wednesday evenings at 700 p.m. thanks so much for watching happy cruising and we'll see you tomorrow bye

Channel: Byte Size Cruises

Views: 703

Keywords: first time cruise tips, cruise tips, cruise tips for first timers, cruise talk, cruise tips for travellers, cruising tips, save money on a cruise, using your phone on a cruise, cruise phone tips, cruising phone tips, save money on phone on cruise

Id: oV324YYQdTg

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024