Sometimes on a Royal Caribbean (RCL) or Carnival Cruise Line (CCL) cruise, it can feel like the two cruise lines have opted to nickel and dime their customers. That's especially true on the newest, largest ships, where in addition to all of the freely-included food and entertainment options, there are a lot of added choices that cost money.
In many cases, that's not a truly fair assessment because just because the cruise lines upsell a lot does not mean you actually have to buy anything. Your cruise won't be ruined because you don't pay extra to do an escape room or eat in a specialty restaurant.
But, some extras do actually directly relate to how you enjoy your cruise. And, now, Royal Caribbean has decided to make one of those things free.
Royal Carribbean
Keeping in Touch on Cruise Ships Is Hard (or Expensive)
Americans (really, most of the world) have gotten used to being able to keep in touch with everyone at all times. The cellphone has made the days of families leaving notes on the fridge for each other to share where anyone might be have long since past.
On a cruise ship, however, WiFi access costs extra and some people opt to not pay for it, or to share one account with multiple people in a traveling party. If you don't have WiFi, you can't text the people you are traveling with to let them know where you are.
Families and people traveling together have tried to fix that problem with everything from walkie-talkies to magnetic dry erase boards that can be mounted on cabin doors. The problem with the former is that they don't work that well and are a bit obnoxious when they do. For the second, an old-school message board works, but by the time you walk to your room to see a note and then head to where your family or friends are, they may have moved.
Royal Caribbean and Carnival have very large cruise ships including some which can accommodate over 5,000 passengers. It's not practical to have to walk back and forth to your room and it's not financially viable to buy every person their own WiFi account.
The solution to that has been that Royal Caribbean and Carnival offer chat through their apps. Carnival's costs $5 per person, per trip, while Royal Caribbean charges $1.99 per person, per day to use its chat feature.
That's a deal compared to WiFi, but it's something Royal Caribbean passengers have long thought should not be an extra charge and now, they're getting their wish granted.
Royal Caribbean Makes its Chat Free
Royal Caribbean Group President Michael Bayley promised the change during remarks he made on Wonder of the Seas in December and now the cruise line has actually pulled the trigger.
The cruise line made the change on all sailings in the new year, the Royal Caribbean Blog first reported. Basically, the chat works as it did previously. To use it, guests must download the Royal Caribbean app (a good idea anyways) and they can then chat with anyone on a connected reservation through the app's chat feature. You can also add other travelers (even new friends made onboard) to the chat, which works a lot like any text messaging app.
Royal Caribbean has likely been able to make this change because it has more internet capacity on its ships as it has been adding Elon Musk's SpaceX Starlink internet across the fleet. That has increased internet speeds and improved the overall experience for passengers opting to pay for WiFi.
The Starlink rollout is happening currently and is expected to be in service fleetwide in the first quarter of the year.
