$5 use of phone as walkie-talkie

[NancyC]

Has anyone paid the $5 charge to call friends and family on the ship?  How did it work?  I guess everyone in our group has to pay the $5 to receive calls.  Does it work with iPhones as well as Samsung?  How was the reception?  Do you pay before the cruise or once on ship?  

[maxandmolly]

It is a text message service, not phone calls. From my understanding the service is iffy at best. 

[nwcruiselover]

As mentioned above, this is a text service, no calls.  It’s paid for after getting on the ship.  Each person who wants to text pays the $5.00.  

[Clarasgrandma]

We didn’t have any issues with it on our last cruise but each person has to have the app open to make communication efficient otherwise they won’t see the messages until they open the app which will delay responses. We think it’s worth the 5 bucks.

[wemjam]

We used it on 1 cruise with family.  It did work for the most part for the $5; however, I will say we did have occasions where even with the app open the messages were delayed considerably - over 20/30 minutes.

 

So if you are texting someone and saying "hey where are you" cause you want to find them, it can be a delayed response 😄

[pe4all]

We have used it since inception.  It is called the "chat" feature.  It works pretty well - at times - lol.  For $5 it is worth the gamble.

[skrufy]

We have had good and not so good service. Mostly good. The bad was the text messages were not instantaneous. The rest of the features worked fine.

[njguy_south]

Is it included in the price of the internet packages?

[jsglow]

16 minutes ago, njguy_south said:

Is it included in the price of the internet packages?

No, it's an add on expense.

[bguppies]

We tried it the first time when traveling with a few groups of friends to try and coordinate activities, dinner and shows.

 

From the first night it did not work and half our group never got the message to head down for dinner and we wound up not being allowed in for dinner until the entire group arrived which after 15  minutes they cancelled our reservation.

Throughout tyhe cruise we never could figure out how and why it would work.

 

It might work for me at 8AM, but nobody else.

Then at 9AM it might work for us all.

Then an hour later for none of us.

 

I think we all had it work at least once during the cruise, but it did not function, more than it ever functioned.

 

We will definitely never waste the money on it until I hear they do a good reset.

 

[tidecat]

23 hours ago, jsglow said:

No, it's an add on expense.

You actually don't need to purchase a Internet package to use the chat feature in the Hub app.

[Gamecock_Cruiser]

It is $5 to text through the Carnival app. It worked fine for us, but two things we learned for it to work. 1, make sure you notification are turned on and do not close the app. As long as we did these two things, it was fine. If the person you are sending it to ahs swiped up and "closed" their carnival hub app, they won't get the message until they re-open the app.

[sparks1093]

On 5/13/2023 at 8:54 PM, maxandmolly said:

It is a text message service, not phone calls. From my understanding the service is iffy at best. 

We just got off the Glory a few weeks ago and the chat feature was very much improved, so I'm optimistic that it's trending in the right direction.

[sunshower9]

I just got off the Celebration yesterday and bought the chat for me and my husband.  Half the time our messages never came through.  Other times they were delayed when they actually did come through.  It's bad enough that we have to pay to chat with people staying in the same cabin.  It's worse that it doesn't even work correctly.

[Fredette]

On 5/14/2023 at 10:35 AM, NancyC said:

Has anyone paid the $5 charge to call friends and family on the ship?  How did it work?  I guess everyone in our group has to pay the $5 to receive calls.  Does it work with iPhones as well as Samsung?  How was the reception?  Do you pay before the cruise or once on ship?  

If everyone in your party has an iphone - you can text without paying for access.  It's a feature Iphones have - but don't ask me how - a friend adjusted the setting on my phone and hubby's phone so we could message each other.  That said - sometimes the message came through straight away, sometimes it took a few minutes.

[momof3cruisers]

2 hours ago, Fredette said:

If everyone in your party has an iphone - you can text without paying for access.  It's a feature Iphones have - but don't ask me how - a friend adjusted the setting on my phone and hubby's phone so we could message each other.  That said - sometimes the message came through straight away, sometimes it took a few minutes.

Yep. I had better luck messaging my sisters via iMessage who were in CA, AZ and TX than I did messaging my son who was on the ship with me via the app. LOL 

[ninjacat123]

The four of us on Sunshine last week were on Airplane Mode (I triple checked) and we could text each other without the Hub Chat feature.  Maybe because we are with T Mobile?  Generally, text messages were delivered quickly.

[cruiserNC]

It's a major battery drain and you must keep the app open all the time. I would invest in the social media package and use another app for communicating.