email

[shipcruise]

Many of the ships we have been on we have been able to send and recieve email (without having to spend time logging on the aol or whatever) and the cost has been nominal, approx $2 per email. Does anyone know is this possible with Princess?

[judynorth]

So far as I know, the only way to send email from the ship is from the internet cafe or from your own laptop with wireless in the atrium (on some ships). The charge is $.35 per minute. Be forewarned, the connections are slow so it might take a while to send an email. In Alaska we were not pleased with the internet cafe. A good bit of the time there was no access available. But then Alaska is pretty remote.

[Toto2Kansas]

I have never heard of anything like this on a Princess ship except sending the email yourself from either your laptop or from the Internet cafe. Sorry, never heard of it on Princess before!

[bluehorizonlover123]

You must go to the internet cafe to send and receive emails and the download time is not always fast. It can get expensive. Look for specials on the first day when you get on the ship.

[shipcruise]

You know that is what I was afraid of. I do not like it when the cruiselines do this. On HAL, Radisson and Oceania you are given a shipboard address and you can recieve and send emails with this from the internet cafe without logging on to aol, etc. thus the cost is only about $1-$2 per email which is reasonable. Doesn't sound like this is the case with Princess. You know it is really a super nice feature I wonder why all the cruise lines do not do it. It gets many, many more people using the service because it is reasonable. If that is the way it is on Princess, I will likely not even go to the internet cafe. When we go to the Med it is the best way to contact home because of the time change and phone charges even off the ship, this can be the best solution. Princess-wake up!

[parody]

You know it is really a super nice feature I wonder why all the cruise lines do not do it.

 

The basic answer to this question is, like most things, there are 2 sides to the issue. In addition to the cruise lines that you mentioned, Celebrity also issues passengers an email address that will be valid only for the duration of the cruise. In my opinion, a very attractive feature of this approach is that if one does receive an email to this address, the message light on your stateroom phone lights up notifying you that you need to go to the Internet Cafe to retrieve the message. Within certain very reasonable size limits, the cost is fixed as you mentioned. The downside of this approach is that you need to alert all or most of the individuals that you communicate with that any mail sent to you must use this "special" address for one period of time only. If, by chance, someone sends an email to your normal address, you won't know about it. In addition, if you are able to log into your normal email account, you then have access to all your sent and deleted email along with your address book. This can be quite a powerful reason to stay with an approach that relies on using your normal email address. Unless you use WIFI and compose email messages off-line, this will likely be more expensive than the former approach unless you are a gold or platinum member in which case email from the Internet Cafe is free.