Iona wifi and keeping your group together

Iona was the first of P&O's two giants and is within a few hundred tonnes of Arvia — roughly 184,000 gross tonnes, about 344 metres, around 5,200 guests. The wifi arrangement is identical to the rest of the fleet. What is different is how far apart your family can get.

What the ship gives you for nothing

The onboard network is free to join, and it runs My Holiday: the daily programme, dining and theatre bookings, virtual queues, your account. It is a web page rather than an app, and it works with your phone in airplane mode, which is where your phone should be anyway. Why airplane mode matters at sea.

What it does not give you is any way to message the people you came with. P&O has no guest chat on any ship.

The paid part, and how much of it you need

Internet is sold in tiers, per device. The question worth asking is not which tier but how many. Most families buy one each by default and use most of it messaging each other — which is the one job the package is worst value for. One package for whoever might be needed at home usually covers it. The decision, laid out.

Check first whether your fare already includes one. Plenty do, and people buy twice. What P&O charges.

Where a ship this size catches people out

Iona is long enough that the walk from one end to the other is a genuine excursion, and tall enough that "upstairs" covers a dozen decks. The things that go wrong are not exotic:

• Somebody says they will be "at the bar" and there are several.
• Two halves of a family spend half an hour missing each other between the SkyDome and the atrium.
• A phone is on silent in a pocket and nobody can reach it at all.

None of that is solved by a faster connection. It is solved by being able to send a short message to the people you are with, and by having agreed where to meet if that fails.

What CruiseLink does here

CruiseLink passes messages directly between your group's phones over Bluetooth and the ship's local network — no package, no account, free.

The honest limits on a ship of this size: it reaches only your own group, everyone needs it installed before you sail, and a message travels when phones come near enough rather than instantly from end to end. With five thousand people moving about, something usually is near enough. Not always.

Keep the meeting point too. Naming the deck is the whole trick.

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.