If you don’t have a package that includes wifi, it can be very expensive to buy wifi for you and your family members.
What we did was a little different and a lot cheaper. We bought Pay as you Go SIMS for our phones with a large amount of data included. (£30 in UK for 30GB as an example) This means you can leave your data on all the time and if it can’t reach free data from land, you don’t have to worry about being accidentally charged the huge satellite amounts.
You’ll probably find that on port days you have data from when you get up in the morning until a little while after you leave port in the evening.
On sea days, sometimes you’re sometimes close enough to land to still be able to use data or you can buy a day of wifi - $20 for 1 device, $40 for up to 4 devices.
Either way, even when we had no wifi or data, we still seemed to be able to iMessage each other. It was great!
Also it’s easy to locate your shipmates using the free access to the Medallion App as some free access is included so you can order food, check on the day’s events, see your account bill.
Hope this helps save you some $£€!! 😊