A Lackluster Experience with AT&T Cruise Package

~ Chris Wada

We purchased an AT&T Cruise Package before our Carnival Horizon cruise, but honestly couldn’t figure out how to make it work.

Trying to use it on the Carnival Horizon

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So this is where things get a little confusing. There is a difference between what we had on the ship and what AT&T now offers. First, let me discuss what we had access to then outline the current set-up.

The (prior) AT&T Cruise Package offerings

When we cruised at the beginning of April 2025, we had two choices for a AT&T Cruise Package:

  • AT&T Cruise Basic: $60/month
  • AT&T Cruise Plus: $100/month

AT&T Cruise Basic

AT&T described this package as the following:

  • Talk: 100 minutes, overage $1.00/min
  • Text: Unlimited
  • Data: 100MB, overage $10/100MB
  • Package ends 30 days from the start date

If you’re streaming, you’ll end up burning through your data pretty quickly. But the real benefit of this package over the ship’s Wi-Fi package is included talk. In some ways, this can be thought of an emergency use only type of package. The texting feature might not actually add anything because your ship might give everyone free texting (as the Carnival Horizon gave us).

AT&T Cruise Plus

AT&T described this package as follows:

  • Talk: Unlimited
  • Text: Unlimited
  • Data: 1GB, overage $10/100MB
  • Package ends 30 days from the start date

If you anticipated talking on the phone pretty much the whole cruise, this would have been the package for you. More data is a fair pairing, and it could have still been cheaper than what the ship charges, so compare prices accordingly.

The (new) AT&T Cruise Package

Go figure that a week after our cruise ended, AT&T changed the way internet on cruise ships work. If you go onto the AT&T website, you will find a new offering available (and no mention of the prior set-up). The features of this new package are, as AT&T describes:

  • An International Day Pass™ for cruise travelers to provide both connection at sea as well as at port.
  • Now available on more than 400 cruise ships.
  • A seamless connectivity experience between land and sea.

They’re selling this package at $20/day. The normal price of the AT&T package is $12/day for connectivity while abroad. If you’re a buyer at that price for the access in foreign countries, then you can think of the upcharge as being just $8 for time spent on the ship on port days. And then connectivity for Sea Days would be the full $20/day as the land plan doesn’t cover anything at sea.

Leave it to AT&T to find a more expensive way to replace the old packages they once had. Even the more expensive package previously was just $100/month but now they’re charging $20/day. Maybe the added benefit is calling and data at your destination, but I find it hard to believe that many would need the coverage at port. There are cheaper ways to get internet abroad. To me, this just feels like a cash grab more than adding functionality.

Our experience with using a AT&T Cruise Package

For our week-long cruise out of Miami, we purchased the Basic package for $60/month. I thought of this as a hedge for our internet needs, especially after how unusable the internet was on our cruise last year. If we couldn’t figure out how to use the ship’s Wi-Fi package, surely we could figure out how to connect with AT&T.

Well, that’s literally as far as we got. Once at sea, we connected to the ship’s signal off airplane mode as instructed. But we couldn’t get anything to load when attempting to access data. Whether we had roaming on or off, the result was the same: nothing but failed pages loading. The Carnival Horizon was indeed listed on the eligible ships that have coverage. So I’m honestly not sure what happened here.

We attempted multiple times at various times of the day. I tried carefully looking at the phone’s settings to figure out if by chance there was some simple button that was turned off accidentally, but couldn’t figure it out. I even tried logging onto my account to see if any data was used and didn’t see anything register while we were out at sea.

Had we been on the new plan scheme, I don’t think our experience would be any different. Being unable to access the internet doesn’t depend on what type of plan we have. We should have had coverage, and that makes me hesitant to try their service again even under the new structure.

If anyone has thoughts about what went wrong for us, we’d be interested in learning.

The old package was easy to cancel for a full refund

Of course, with the internet as successful as it was on our cruise, it was simple to just remove the package from our plan. I just logged into my account, selected the package, and removed it. Since we weren’t able to actually use any data, the add-on was fully removed from the account.

I imagine that under the new scheme getting a refund would be difficult. The way these day passes work is that as soon as it registers your phone as being out of area, it turns the package on. Maybe you would be successful if you complain that the service didn’t give what was promised, but that’s an extra step of talking to customer service.

Bottom line

I honestly thought the AT&T Cruise Package would have given us an easier time connecting to data. And yet we were not able to figure it out on our cruise. Meanwhile, we had no problems just working off our ship’s Wi-Fi package so we ended up canceling. Our experience doesn’t leave us hope that we can figure it out with the new day pass system.

Stay tuned for the next installment where we’ll look at the casino on the ship, as I have a few comments about it.

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