Cruise ship roaming charges

The expensive mistake is letting your phone connect to the ship's own mobile service. That is maritime roaming, it is billed separately from ordinary roaming, and it is not covered by your normal allowance or by EU roaming rules — because the ship is not in a country. One setting prevents all of it.

Why it is not normal roaming

When you use your phone in Spain, you are on a Spanish network and your provider has an arrangement covering it. A ship at sea is not in Spain or anywhere else, so it carries its own small mobile mast, backed by satellite. Your phone sees it as a network called something like "Cellular at Sea" or "Maritime" and connects without asking.

Nothing about your usual allowance applies to it. Calls, texts and especially data are charged at maritime rates, which are high.

How people get billed without using their phone

This is the part that catches people out. A phone in your pocket is not idle. It refreshes apps in the background, checks email, backs up photos, downloads updates and syncs messages. Every one of those over the ship's mobile service costs money, and you were asleep.

It also only takes a moment. The mast reaches well beyond the ship, so a phone can latch on while you are still in sight of the port.

The fix, in order

1. Airplane mode on, before you sail. This is the whole answer. It disconnects the phone from mobile networks completely.
2. Turn wifi back on by itself if you want to use the ship's wifi or a port's. Wifi and airplane mode coexist happily.
3. Turn off data roaming as well, as a second layer in case airplane mode gets knocked off.
4. Check everyone else's phone too — particularly children's, and particularly anyone who is not confident with settings. One phone left on can cost more than the wifi package would have.

If your provider offers a cruise or maritime bundle and you genuinely need to be reachable, that is a legitimate option. Buy it deliberately rather than discovering it afterwards.

What you can still do with the phone in airplane mode

Everything that does not need the outside world. The camera, your photos, downloaded music and books, the ship's own app over its local wifi — and messaging the people you are travelling with, if you have something that works phone to phone.

CruiseLink is that: messages pass directly between the phones in your group over Bluetooth and the ship's local network, with the phone in airplane mode throughout. It is free and there is no account.

It reaches only your own group, everyone needs it installed before sailing, and a message travels when phones come near enough rather than instantly across the whole ship.

Get CruiseLink

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