Check your cruise line

Pick your line and see what it actually offers for keeping your group in touch onboard — whether its app carries guest chat, what that costs, and whether you can bring walkie talkies.

Why the gaps are left as gaps

Several entries here say we do not know. That is deliberate, and it is the thing that makes the rest of the table worth reading.

Cruise lines are genuinely hard to check. Most do not publish wifi prices on the open web at all, and several of their sites return nothing readable to anyone who is not a browser with a booking. Plenty of pages elsewhere fill those blanks with confident numbers. We would rather show you where our knowledge stops.

If you have sailed one of these recently and know an answer we have left blank, tell us and we will add it with the date it was checked.

What the answers mean in practice

• Chat included — the line's own app carries guest-to-guest messaging over the ship's network, free, with no internet package. Everyone in your group still has to install the app and find the feature, which is where most groups fall down.
• Chat costs extra — a fee per person for the voyage, and both ends of a conversation must have paid. For a family of six that multiplies.
• No chat — the app does everything else and not this. P&O is the big example.
• Walkie talkies — a policy question, not a technical one. Even where permitted, steel decks block the direction you need. Why they disappoint onboard.

The option that does not vary by line

Everything above depends on which ship you booked. Phones reaching each other directly does not: it works the same on every line, because it does not use the line's network or the line's app.

CruiseLink passes messages between your group's phones over Bluetooth and the ship's local network, free, iPhone and Android. The limits are the same everywhere too, and worth repeating here: everyone installs it before sailing, it reaches your group rather than the ship, and it is not instant across a big vessel.

For most families the sensible answer is both — use the line's chat if it is free, and have something that works regardless. Compared honestly here.

Get CruiseLink

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