Because I run my own business, and have various family matters that mean I have to stay in touch with home when away on holiday, we decided to pay the extra fee on our Caribbean cruise on Arvia for the wifi internet package, as there’s no mobile service at sea.
It’s an expensive add-on (about £250 per person) so I hoped it was effective!
You actually pay per connected device, so if you just pay for one connected device, you can only have one single device connected at any one time.
However that doesn’t mean it’s limited only to that device – you can use as many devices as you want throughout the holiday, but only one can be connected at any one time.
You can’t be online on your mobile and then connect a laptop – you need to disconnect the mobile in order to then connect a laptop.
So if, like us, you have two teenagers, only one of them can be online at a time, meaning they have to agree between themselves to let each other use it one at a time!
In practice this actually worked out fine, as we didn’t really want to be stuck on our devices all the time – and having the single device plan shared between all four of us was no problem at all and it wouldn’t have been worth paying extra to have more than one device (that money would be much better spent on shore excursions).
So how well does the wifi work on board P&O cruise ship Arvia?
The answer is – pretty well, certainly well enough for everything we needed to do on it, for work and personal use.
It’s not like we were trying to do extensive heavy downloads of films or streaming content, so I can’t say how well it works if that’s your intention.
But we used it for….
- Social media (children on Snapchat / Instagram, etc
- Messaging (WhatsApp, etc)
- WhatsApp voice calls and video calls home
- Checking / sending emails
- Uploading our holiday photos and videos to the cloud
- Researching shore excursions on the web
… And it worked 100% of the time for all of these things.
The internet on P&O Arvia is provided by satellite (Elon Musk’s Starlink) and it was fast enough to use when out at sea with no trouble at all.
It wasn’t as fast as normal home broadband, but it still had surprisingly good reliability, and I can’t remember one single time where I lost connection or couldn’t do what I needed to do on it.
There are points at several of the ports where you can get free wifi, but these actually seemed less reliable than the on-board wifi.
The £250 or so cost was worth it to be able to stay in touch with what I needed to do for work, keep in touch with home and for the children to stay in touch with their friends back home (which we wanted to let them do as they’re at the age when coming on holiday with their parents is probably not as fun for them as it used to be).
It was also useful for staying in touch to some extent with each other onboard.
Although we could only have the one connected device, we could still send messages to a WhatsApp group, knowing that any one of the other members of the family on board would soon be connecting and would then receive that message – albeit not in ‘real time’, but still adequate for communicating when we’d gone our separate ways around the ship.
It’s expensive, but works well enough to justify the cost if you need internet on your cruise.
I realised another benefit of it too, when a fellow passenger told us she’d lost her phone on an excursion meaning all her photos from her entire holiday had gone with it – because she had no internet, none of them were backed up to iCloud.
Having taken thousands of photos of dream locations, I realised the value of having them automatically backed up each day via the ship’s wifi connection, which wouldn’t happen without the wifi package.