5Stripes

On 3/26/2019 at 11:35 AM, Hank Jr. said:

Thanks for the feedback. Although I won't be able to surprise my sisters they are super excited! And I did finally find the spreadsheet on the Royal Caribbean blog! 

Hope my stay is as enjoyable as yours! 

Hank Jr. can you post that spreadsheet?  It is no longer available on the blog

11 hours ago, KatWoman92 said:

 

Same.  It worked great for us.  And, the cool thing about the app is that on certain ships, you don't even have to buy the wifi to use the messaging.  Bottom line is DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOU.  Not all innovations are bad.  

11 hours ago, leisuretraveler223 said:

 

When my wife and I took her four kids on a cruise for the first time, I felt this was too.  This was before the app.  I was like "no way I'm giving them a wifi package just so they can be on their phones!  So, the first evening, we made a plan to meet up at a certain location at a certain time to see what everyone was up to.  When the time came, my wife and I had to leave the lounge and wander to our arbitrary meeting point.  And the kids were in the same situation. They were like "we WERE having fun in the teen club but had to stop and come here".

 

I then realized that I could be hung up on my ideology all I wanted but it wasn't making the cruise easier for me either.

 

Yeah, we got them wifi and my cruise was better!

I used to love air travel because no one could reach you for a few hours.  Then Wifi on planes.  I love cruises for the same reason.  Once that's free/cheap all my vacations will be in the middle of the desert somewhere.  

Our kids don't have phones yet and are too young to let roam about too much.   But I read about the messaging app being free and thought it might afford them some opportunities to get ice cream or watch a movie....  Plus it seems to have a location finder on it too.  The phones on Disney Cruises were awesome for this.  Trying to replicate that, for free. 🙂

If the boat doesn't sink because we didn't do it old school, or our kids didn't steal anyone's pearls, I'll report back with how it went.

2 hours ago, Heymarco said:

Every parent has their opinions, just ignore them. 

 

If you are worried about your child using the device for other things, you can easily restrict it to one app. Apple allows this using guided access mode (similar to how kiosks in mall, etc work). If you want to lock your kids phone to Royal app while onboard.

 

1. Make sure guided access mode is enabled. (Settings app -> General -> Accessibility -> Toggle Guided Access on under learning section at bottom.) Be sure to set special passcode here as well.

 

2. Open Royal app

 

3.  Triple click home button, and press start. If phone doesn’t have a home button, then triple click side button.

 

To stop guided access: Triple click home button again, enter special passcode, and click disable.

 

Cheers!

Thanks. She has a burner phone from when she flew alone to visit grand parents.  It is quite locked down.  I forgot about that tripple click on iOS.  I'll have to remind my iPhone friends of that.

Wow you got lit up by all the "we know everything crowd, how dare you...".  But, did you ever find a solution?  We have a couple of 9 year olds that we would like to be able to let them some freedom on the boat.  Since RC doesn't let us bring our helicopters, I wanted to use the app, so that on a friggin ginormous boat with 6000+people, we could easily let our kids know when it's time to come home, eat, take a bath, whatever.  

Since I didn't raise my kids in this mystical time when somehow on an 18 deck ship kids just showed up when you needed them, I'm curious how other solved this.  @biker19 please let us know how you managed to solve this problem.