How to find someone on a cruise ship
Start at whatever you agreed before you split up, then work through the places they said they were going. Guest services will page someone in a real emergency and will always act on a missing child, but they will not do it because dinner is getting cold. For ordinary losing-each-other, the thing that works is being able to message them without internet.
Why the usual methods fail at sea
Find My on an iPhone, and Google's equivalent on Android, both send a location out to the internet. At sea there is no internet unless somebody has bought a package, so the map simply shows where that person last was in port. The same is true of WhatsApp's live location and every other app that works by the same route.
Mobile signal is the same story. Once the ship is a few miles out there is nothing but the ship's own satellite service, billed as roaming, and most people have sensibly put their phone in airplane mode to avoid it.
What actually works
1. The agreement you made before you split up
Unglamorous and still the most reliable thing on this page. A time and a specific place — not "the pool", which there are four of. Experienced cruising families agree a fallback as a matter of course: if we lose each other, we are at the atrium bar at six.
2. Guest services
They can page a passenger over the ship's system. In practice they will do it for a genuine emergency and not for a missing dinner companion. A missing child is always an emergency — go straight there, say those words, and let them run their procedure. Do not search alone for twenty minutes first.
3. The cruise line's app
Most lines have guest chat, and some show where your party is. It works over the ship's wifi network, which you can join without buying a package. Which lines charge for it is here. The catch is that the app only receives while it is open and connected, so a message can sit unread for an hour.
4. An app that does not need the network at all
CruiseLink passes messages straight between the phones in your group over Bluetooth. If the person you are looking for is anywhere near you, or near anyone else in your group, your message reaches them.
It also has a feature built for exactly this. Anyone can start a search for a person, and every phone in the group joins in: whichever one reaches them first says so, and the person being looked for gets an alert with a single button, I'm here, which ends the search for everybody at once. Searches expire after eight hours by themselves.
It came from a real evening. Somebody's phone was on silent, the family spent an hour looking, and the obvious thing — everyone's phone looking at once rather than everyone's feet — did not exist yet.
The honest limits
- It is not a tracker and does not show anyone on a map. It tells you when each person was last reached, which is a smaller and more truthful claim.
- A locked iPhone on silent stays silent. Apple reserves the entitlement that overrides the silent switch for a short list of apps, and we have asked for it and not been granted it. On Android the alert plays on the alarm channel, which a silent phone still sounds.
- It only reaches your own group, and everyone needs it installed before you sail.
- A phone several decks away with nobody in between is not reachable until somebody moves.
What to agree before you sail
- A meeting point and a time, named precisely. "The bar on deck 7 by the atrium", not "the bar".
- A rule for children: who they go to if they are lost, and that any crew member counts.
- Cabin numbers written down, on paper, in a pocket. Phones go flat.
- Something that works without internet, installed on everyone's phone while you still have a normal connection. That takes about fifteen minutes.
Get CruiseLink
Free, no account, nothing to set up beyond your group. iPhone today; Android is built and in testing.
