Message your group onboard, without buying wifi
CruiseLink passes short messages straight between the phones in your group, over Bluetooth and over the ship's own wifi network. You do not need an internet package, a signal, or an account.
Free on the App Store How to set your group up
iPhone today. Android is built and in testing, but not public yet.
The problem it solves
Once the ship leaves port your phone has no usable signal, and the ship's internet is sold per person. A family of five pays five times. So one or two people buy it, everybody else does not, and the group spends the week leaving notes on the cabin door.
CruiseLink takes a different route. Rather than sending your message out to the internet and back, it hands it to the other phones around you.
How it actually works
Phone to phone
Your phone passes messages to the other phones in your group over Bluetooth, with the screens locked and the phones in pockets.
Through the ship's wifi
If the ship's network lets guests reach each other, your phones use it — connected to the wifi, but with no package bought.
Carried by your group
A message for someone out of range travels through whoever is in between, so it still arrives.
What it will not do
Being straight about this matters more than a feature list.
- It is not instant across a whole ship. A message reaches someone when phones come near enough, directly or through another phone in the group. Several decks apart with nobody in between, it waits.
- It only reaches your own group. It is not a way to message home, and not a way to reach strangers onboard.
- Everyone has to install it before you sail, while you still have a normal connection. That is the single most common reason a group never gets going.
- A locked iPhone on silent stays silent. Apple reserves the entitlement that lets an app override the silent switch, and we have not been granted it.
What we have measured
From the testers' own phones, not a brochure. One evening with six people moving around a venue with no shared wifi, a Samsung handset completed 317 message exchanges, every one of them over Bluetooth, and re-found the same two people every four to seven minutes. Battery, measured with the phone locked and nobody touching it, ran at 2.2% to 7.8% an hour for the whole phone, not just this app.
The one ship network we have tested on ourselves was P&O's Arvia, where guests could reach each other. We cannot promise that of every line, and we do not.
Start here
If you are wondering whether texting works at all onboard, read can you text on a cruise ship. If you are weighing up radios, read walkie talkies for cruise ships. If you are sold and want the group set up properly, read how to set your group up before you sail.
Sailing with a particular line? There is a page on P&O Cruises wifi and what it costs, and one on the cruise lines' own chat apps.
Get CruiseLink
Free, no account, nothing to set up beyond your group. iPhone today; Android is built and in testing.
