NCL Getaway using AT&T cruise ship plan

[realnice46]

Has anyone used  AT&T cruise ship plan on board and if so how did it work? Plan seems to be less thru them vs NCL.

[Sailing12Away]

My sister used it on Prima in September for our Iceland trip as a way to stay in touch with my niece. She said on the ship it really wasn't worth it as the delay in receiving text messages was so long that we would bump into the kids randomly before the text came through saying where they were going. 

 

At the ports of call it worked for her to get in touch with us (we had Tmobile and free international stuff to begin with), but at sea it wasn't worth it she said - at least for the price she had to pay for 2 phones.

[BirdTravels]

4 hours ago, realnice46 said:

Has anyone used  AT&T cruise ship plan on board and if so how did it work? Plan seems to be less thru them vs NCL.

 

If you use your phone on the ship, connected to the ship's cell tower, the charges bill through AT&T. If you have a plan, the billing will be through the plan. Be very very careful since it would be easy to blow through the included data. If you connect to the ship's cell tower and don't have a plan, you are billed standard AT&T pay-per-use rates ($3/minute talk, $0.50 per text message, $1.30 per video or picture message, $2.05/MB data). 

 

Alternative: If you just connect to the ship's wifi/internet, you can use your phone for wifi calling. That has to be set up prior to boarding the ship. And you need to have a wifi plan on the ship.

 

We have used cruise ship plans for voice and it worked very well (better than wifi calling). 

[Rick&Jeannie]

Another alternative (with the wifi plan) would be WhatsApp. It gives you text and video calling capabilities for free.

[realnice46]

Thank you all.