CruiseLink
Staying in touch on the big P&O ships
Ship size is not a detail here. It is the whole problem. A bigger ship means more decks of steel between you and your family, longer walks to check somewhere they might be, and more people sharing one satellite connection. What works on a small ship stops working on a very large one.
- Arvia wifi, and finding your family on P&O's biggest shipThe biggest ship P&O has. Everything about finding people is harder on it.
- Iona wifi and keeping your group together onboardArvia's sister, and the ship that started the class.
- P&O Britannia wifi and staying in touch onboardForty thousand tonnes smaller, and it genuinely helps.
Roughly what you are dealing with
| Ship | Gross tonnage | Length | Guests |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arvia | ~184,700 | ~345 m | ~5,200 |
| Iona | ~184,000 | ~344 m | ~5,200 |
| Britannia | ~143,000 | ~330 m | ~4,300 |
Published figures differ between sources, particularly on guest numbers, which depend on whether pull-out beds are counted. These are approximate and good enough for the point being made.
What gets harder as a ship gets bigger
- Finding someone on foot. Sixteen guest decks and a third of a kilometre means checking three plausible bars is a twenty-minute walk, not a two-minute one.
- The wifi, at the times you want it. More passengers share the same connection. Evenings and sea days are when everyone is aboard and online at once.
- Vague arrangements. "The pool" is fine on a small ship. On Arvia it is several different places. Naming the deck matters.
- Anything that relies on radio. Steel decks stop signals travelling vertically far better than they stop them travelling along a deck. Why walkie talkies disappoint people onboard.
What does not change
P&O sells the same wifi packages across the fleet, per device, and My Holiday has no guest messaging on any of them. So the problem is identical in kind on every ship; it is only the scale that moves.
CruiseLink passes messages straight between the phones in your group over Bluetooth and the ship's local network, free, with every phone in airplane mode. On a bigger ship its limits matter more, and they are worth stating plainly: it reaches only your own group, everyone needs it installed before sailing, and a message travels when phones come near enough — directly, or carried by someone else in the group who happens to move between you.
On a ship the size of Arvia, that last point is the one to understand. A message from deck 16 to a cabin on deck 5 with nobody in between waits until somebody moves. Often that is seconds, because people are constantly walking about. Sometimes it is longer.
Get CruiseLink
Free, no account, nothing to set up beyond your group. On iPhone and Android, and the two work together.
