How to contact someone on a cruise ship from home

For anything urgent, call the cruise line's emergency contact number rather than the passenger's mobile. The ship will find them. A mobile number only works if that person has bought the ship's internet or happens to be in port.

This page is about reaching a ship from land. It is a different problem from the one this app solves, and sending people to the wrong answer in a worrying moment would be worse than useless.

In an emergency: the cruise line, not the passenger

Every major cruise line runs a shoreside emergency line, staffed around the clock, for exactly this. You give them the ship, the sailing date and the passenger's name; they pass the message to the ship, and guest services onboard finds the person and gets them to a phone.

It is not instant — it goes through people — but it is the route that always works, regardless of what anyone has bought or what their phone is doing.

Write the number down before anyone sails. It is on the booking confirmation and on the line's own website, usually under "contact us" or "guest services". Looking it up calmly in advance is a five-minute job; looking it up at two in the morning when you are frightened is not. Note the ship's name and the sailing dates beside it.

Calling the ship directly

Ships carry satellite telephone numbers that anyone can dial, and the call is connected to the cabin. It works. It is also charged at satellite rates — several pounds or dollars a minute, billed to the caller — and the cabin phone has to be answered, which on a cruise it very often is not, because nobody is in the cabin.

So treat this as the expensive way to have a conversation rather than the reliable way to raise an alarm. The emergency line above is the one that finds a person.

Why their mobile goes quiet

At sea there is no mobile network. A phone shows no bars, or it latches on to the ship's own maritime roaming cell at prices that make people switch it off. So a text, a WhatsApp or an iMessage sent from home does one of three things:

• It arrives, if they bought the ship's wifi. Packages run roughly £10–£30 a day per device on most lines.
• It arrives in a burst when the ship docks and their phone finds a shore network — often the next morning, sometimes a day later.
• It sits undelivered for the rest of the cruise.

None of those is a fault with your phone, and chasing it with more messages does not help. What the ship's internet actually costs and does is here.

What to agree before they go

Most of the worry this causes is avoidable with one conversation at the kitchen table:

1. Write down the cruise line's emergency number, the ship, and the sailing dates.
2. Agree when they will be in touch — "we'll message when we're in port" is enough, and it stops silence being read as trouble.
3. Agree what counts as urgent, so nobody is deciding that alone at midnight.
4. Check the itinerary for sea days. Two or three days in a row with no port means two or three days with no signal, and knowing that in advance is the whole difference.

Where this app fits, and where it does not

CruiseLink passes messages between phones that are on the same ship, over Bluetooth and the ship's own local network, with no internet package. It is for the group travelling together — finding each other, saying where you are, agreeing when to meet.

It cannot reach a ship from home. Nothing phone-to-phone can; there is no radio that crosses an ocean. If you are the one at home worrying, the emergency line at the top of this page is your answer, and this app is not.

What it does change is the reason families go quiet on each other in the first place: onboard, nobody has to buy anything to stay in touch with the people they came with. How that works is here.

Get CruiseLink

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