Best way to stay intouch back home

[curlygrljax]

Last year I had a family emergency, got that dreaded 3am satelitte phone call to the ship. I found out from other passengers that texts are the cheapest and they were right. Check with your cell phone carrier. The email on the ship was horrible, took me a lot of time (minutes) just to check emails. Few friends on the ship gave me their left over minutes the last few nights. Having my cell phone (Droid) also allowed me to book emergency flights to my parents while in port in Key West. Just have to be super carefull to turn off all apps that look for data and therefore charge the high rates. Hope this helps!! (and most of all... my dad is now okay, coded twice after a reaction to heart medications)

[Cruise Starter]

If you go to the Princess website and check in the gift shop, you can pre-purchase internet minutes and get bonus minutes. It is about $60 for 120 minutes and they give you 20 minutes bonus for a total of 140 minutes for $60. You can also sometimes get additional bonus minutes with the coupon book, but not always. This works out to about 43 cents a minute if you want to use the internet onboard their ships. You can use this in the internet cafe as well as using your portable device.

 

Also to save I compose e-mails offline to send later when online and use a program (Mozilla) to download my e-mails to my portable device and read them later.

 

I also use internet minutes to download library e-books for my portable e-reader. If you have all the signon information at hand when you sign on, it only takes minutes to download a book.

 

I agree with the writer above about signing off. You do need to follow their procedure to ensure signoff or your minutes continue to be used.

 

Gail

[ibfishing2]

This will be our first cruise....and was wondering which is the best way to stay intouch back home. We have 2 daughters that are staying with relatives and friends. Wanted to make sure they make it to all their dance lessons, ballgames and that our 5 cats are taken care of.

 

Thanks for any help.

:confused:

Which cruise line will you be on?

 

Princess allows you to send a postcard via internet for free. I used this to communicate with family.