Does the P&O Cruises app have chat?

No. My Holiday does a great deal — your account, dining and theatre bookings, virtual queues, shore excursions, the daily programme — but guest-to-guest messaging is not among the things P&O lists, and passengers report the same. On Royal Caribbean or Disney the line hands you a chat feature. On Arvia, Iona or Britannia it does not.

What My Holiday actually is

It is worth clearing up, because people go looking for it in the App Store and cannot find it: My Holiday is a web page, not an app you install. You join the free onboard network — it appears as something like P&OCruises_Guest_WIFI — and open it in your browser.

The genuinely good part is that it costs nothing and needs no internet package. You can use it with your phone in airplane mode, because nothing it does leaves the ship. For the daily programme and booking a table it is the thing to use.

So what are you left with?

Three options, and it is worth knowing all three before you sail rather than working it out on day two.

1. A wifi package. P&O's Essential tier covers browsing, social media and messaging apps, so WhatsApp works on it. The catch is that it is sold per device: a family of four wanting to message each other is four packages, to have a conversation with people who are on the same ship. More on what P&O charges here.
2. Agreed meeting points. Unglamorous and still the most reliable thing on this page. How experienced families do it.
3. Something that does not use the ship's network at all.

The third option

CruiseLink passes messages straight between the phones in your group over Bluetooth and the ship's local network. No package, no account, free, and it works with every phone in airplane mode — the same state you are already in to use My Holiday.

It is the same on every line, so it is not a P&O-specific purchase, and nothing about it depends on what the line decides to include next year.

The honest limits, which matter on a ship the size of Arvia: it reaches only the group you set up, everyone needs it installed before you sail, and a message travels when phones come near enough — directly, or carried by someone else in your group — so it is not instant from one end of the ship to the other.

How P&O compares

Royal Caribbean has included guest chat since 2023 and Disney includes it too. Carnival and Norwegian charge a few pounds per person for it. P&O sits in a fourth category: it does not offer the feature at all. The comparison across lines is here.

That is not unreasonable of them — My Holiday is aimed at running your holiday rather than at being a messenger — but it does mean the problem of finding your family at six o'clock is entirely yours to solve.

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. Checked October 2026 against P&O's own description of My Holiday and passenger reports on Cruise Critic; features change, so confirm onboard.