How cruise families actually leave messages for each other onboard

The honest answer is that most families use three or four things at once, because none of them covers a whole day. A whiteboard on the cabin door catches whoever comes back. The stateroom phone is free but rings into an empty cabin. Agreed times work until somebody is late.

This is the practical list, with what each one is genuinely good for and where it leaves you stuck. We make a messaging app, and it is last, because it would be dishonest to put it first on a page about what people already do.

The cabin door whiteboard

A small magnetic dry-wipe board stuck to the outside of the cabin door, with a pen on a string. Cruise cabin doors are steel, so a magnet holds. Plenty of people bring one specifically for this.

Good for: "Gone to the pool deck, back at 5", left for whoever turns up next. It survives the whole day and needs no battery, no signal and no app.

Where it stops: it only works at the door. If the person is three decks up and does not come back until dinner, your message waits there until dinner. For anything that needs an answer, it is the wrong tool.

Worth knowing: most lines allow decorating cabin doors, but a few restrict magnets or decorations on certain ships or sailings. Check your line's own policy if you are bringing anything elaborate.

Notes under the door

The same idea with less equipment, and it has one advantage over the whiteboard: it is private, and the rest of the corridor cannot read it. Cabin stewards will also pass a message to a cabin if you ask at reception.

Same limitation. It waits at the door.

The stateroom phone

Every cabin has one, and dialling another cabin on the same ship is free — usually just the cabin number. It is genuinely useful and people forget it exists.

Where it stops, and it is the big one: on a cruise almost nobody is in their cabin. People are at breakfast, on deck, ashore, at a show. The phone rings into an empty room, and it is exactly as useful as a landline at home when everyone is out. Ringing round the family's cabins waiting for somebody to get back to their room is a familiar cruise evening, and not a fond memory.

Agreed times and places

The oldest method and still the most reliable. Agree the fixed points of the day — breakfast, the muster point for excursions, dinner, a bar after the show — and nobody needs to be contactable in between.

It works far better than people expect, and it is the thing to get right first. Which meeting points actually hold up on a big ship is here.

Where it stops: the moment anything changes. Somebody is seasick, a queue is an hour long, a child wants to go back to the cabin. The plan was the whole system, and now there is no way to say so.

The cruise line's own app

Several lines carry guest-to-guest chat inside their official app, over the ship's local network, without an internet package: free on Royal Caribbean, Princess and Disney, paid per person on Carnival and Norwegian, and absent entirely on P&O. It works well where it exists.

Where it stops: it depends on the line, it depends on everyone installing and finding it, and on the lines that charge, it is a per-person fee for the whole cruise. Line by line, with what each one charges, is here.

What does not work, despite everyone trying

• WhatsApp, iMessage, ordinary texts. All need an internet connection, which at sea means buying the ship's package. What that costs is here.
• Walkie talkies. Legal on most lines and genuinely disappointing in practice — steel decks stop the signal going up and down, which is the direction you need. The detail is here.
• Find My and location sharing. They need the internet too, so the last known position is wherever the phone was when it last had signal.

And where ours fits

CruiseLink passes messages between the phones in your group directly, over Bluetooth and the ship's local network, with nothing bought. It is free, and it works between iPhone and Android.

Being straight about it: it is not instant across a whole ship, and it only reaches the people who installed it before sailing. It does not replace agreeing a dinner time. What it covers is the gap the other methods leave — the thing that changes at three in the afternoon when nobody is near their cabin.

Most families who use it end up with the same combination as everyone else: agreed times for the fixed points, a whiteboard on the door, and this for the rest.

Get CruiseLink

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