The genealogy cruise season is upon us. One mid-summer genealogy cruise has already occurred, and three more will embark within the next few weeks. If you are one of the 700 or more genealogists who will be on a cruise ship this year, this article is for you. If you ever use any other sort of expensive Internet access, you may also find something of value here for you.
Just because you are on a cruise ship doesn’t mean that you have to be isolated from the world back home. To be sure, some isolation might be an enjoyable experience as we leave our cares and worries behind. However, some of us do want to keep track of children or grandchildren, make sure the person watching the house waters the African violets properly, or perhaps check with the office to see if a particular contract has been signed or not. Whatever the reason, most of us wish to remain in contact for those high priority messages.
Unfortunately, communication to and from a cruise ship is outrageously expensive. All communication is by satellite, and that is always expensive. Then the cruise lines add their own surcharges on top of the already high-priced services.
Telephone calls to and from a cruise ship via the in-cabin telephones typically cost about $10.00 a minute. However, most cruise ships now have their own cell phone towers on board, and placing a call from your own cell phone is much cheaper: typically $2.50 to $5.00 a minute. I must admit, that’s still not cheap.
E-mail and Internet connectivity is also available on almost all cruise ships, but again, at elevated prices: typically 50 cents to 75 cents per minute. Some cruise lines offer discounts if you pre-purchase 100 minutes or more in advance.
Even more aggravating, the connection speeds on cruise ships are normally very slow. One cruise ship I traveled on last year had a 768-kbyte connection speed – if the satellite was overhead and the signal was strong. If the satellite was near the horizon, connection speeds were even slower. Worse yet, twenty or more simultaneous users shared this one connection during busy times of the day. I soon learned to connect only late at night, when contention for the connection was minimal.
I have been amazed to watch other passengers pay these high charges while reading e-mail messages and writing replies online. Even for touch typists, this is a very expensive method of reading and writing e-mail messages. I know one passenger I talked with spent more than $20.00 in online charges the first day at sea, simply by reading four e-mail messages and writing four replies. I’d consider that to be an outrageous charge when calculated on a per-message basis!
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