P&O Britannia wifi and staying in touch

Britannia is about 143,000 gross tonnes and roughly 330 metres, carrying around 4,300 guests — some 40,000 tonnes smaller than Arvia and Iona. The wifi arrangement is identical to theirs. The practical difference is that finding people is genuinely easier here, and that is worth knowing rather than dismissing.

If you arrived looking for a hotel chain's wifi, this is the P&O Cruises ship. The two share a name and nothing else.

Smaller actually matters

It is not a consolation prize. On a ship with fewer decks and a shorter walk from end to end:

• Checking somewhere is cheap. If your family might be in the atrium, you can go and look without losing twenty minutes.
• There are fewer duplicated venues, so "the bar" is nearer to being an actual instruction than it is on the Excel-class ships.
• Fewer people share the connection, which helps at the times it is busiest.
• Phones are closer together, which helps anything that works directly between them.

None of that makes the underlying problem go away. Four thousand people is still a small town, and a phone on silent in a pocket is still unreachable.

What P&O gives you, and what it does not

Free: the onboard network and My Holiday — the daily programme, dining and theatre bookings, virtual queues, your account. It is a web page, not an app, and it works in airplane mode.

Paid: internet access, in tiers, per device. What the tiers cover.

Absent: any way to message the people you are travelling with. P&O does not offer guest chat on Britannia or on any other ship in the fleet.

What to do instead of four packages

The usual mistake is a family buying one package each, mostly to message each other. One package, for whoever might be needed at home, plus something that works locally, covers nearly everyone better and cheaper. The reasoning.

CruiseLink is the local part: messages pass straight between your group's phones over Bluetooth and the ship's local network, free, in airplane mode.

Its limits are the same everywhere — your own group only, installed before sailing, and a message travels when phones come near enough rather than instantly across the ship. On Britannia that last one bites less often than on Arvia, simply because there is less ship for it to cross.

How the three ships compare.

Get CruiseLink

Free, no account, nothing to set up beyond your group. On iPhone and Android, and the two work together.

Not affiliated with P&O Cruises. Ship figures are approximate and vary between published sources. Checked October 2026.