Excellent Internet with Carnival Wi-Fi

~ Chris Wada

We found Carnival Wi-Fi to be quick and extremely responsive, which is a great improvement over our last cruise on Celebrity.

Easy to use on Carnival Cruises

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Carnival Wi-Fi packages and cost

Let’s start off by taking a look at the Wi-Fi packages available on Carnival Cruises. There are three levels of Wi-Fi available:

  • Social Wi-Fi Plan ($18.70/person/day)
  • Value Wi-Fi Plan ($22.10/person/day)
  • Premium Wi-Fi Plan ($23.80/person/day)
    • There is also a four-device Premium Wi-Fi option for $84/day

Social Wi-Fi Plan

Carnival describes this package as the following:

Access the most popular social websites and applications like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, X, Reddit, LinkedIn, and major airline sites. It excludes access to most other websites, email, video, and music streaming services (e.g., Spotify, Netflix, Hulu), cellular-network-dependent Wi-Fi calling and FaceTime services.

If you’re intending to check your email, this isn’t the package for you as the description suggests it will be blocked. This is purely useful for those who simply cannot disconnect from social media. And although it’s not explicitly mentioned, they do restrict bandwidth when you do access those sites (but you might not need it). Personally, the $18.70 daily charge seems excessive for what you ultimately get.

Value Wi-Fi Plan

Carnival describes this package as follows:

Access all sites included in the Social plan with a faster connection speed. Ideal for travelers who want to stay in touch via social media, manage emails, browse, and stay updated on news, sports, and weather. It doesn’t support video streaming or cellular-network-dependent Wi-Fi calling.

If you want basic services, like accessing email, this is the package for you. It won’t give you video streaming, but you’re on a cruise–do you really need that? The main downside is if you have large emails, the slower speeds might get in your way and encourage you to buy up to the next package.

Premium Wi-Fi Plan

Carnival’s most expensive package has the following description:

Experience superior internet performance. This plan offers access to all sites from the Social and Value Plans at speeds up to three times faster. You can stream movies, video chat, monitor your home and browse the web seamlessly, including apps like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, FaceTime, Zoom, and Ring where coverage allows. Cellular-network-dependent Wi-Fi calling is not supported.

There are two main selling features of this package. It promises much faster speeds than the Value package. And you get full access to streaming services. It’s nice when there aren’t artificial speed limits placed on you when using internet and this package will avoid those limits.

I should also call out that there is a promo code that popped up several times when browsing internet packages. It might be a promotion that appears at different times of the year, so it could be worth checking back before your cruise. Saving 10% on the Premium Wi-Fi package makes it cheaper than the Value plan, if nothing else.

You don’t need to pay for Carnival Wi-Fi to access the app

While you do need to get onto Carnival Wi-Fi if you want to use the app, you don’t need to pay for a package. After connecting to the internet, you’ll see the splash screen that asks you to sign in if you have a plan. You can instead just choose the option “Use the Carnival Hub App for Free”.

From there, you can view the ship’s schedule and make reservations from within the app. It also gives you access to messaging functionality. In fact, it’s not just the messaging within the Carnival app–we also got full access to iMessages and even regular texting on our iPhones. So if all you really care about is messaging others (either on the ship or off), know that you don’t need to waste any money on internet packages. That’s awesome.

The premium package in action

Go figure that I wanted to check out the Premium Wi-Fi Plan. After our sub-par experience on the Celebrity Solstice, I wasn’t holding out much hope for this one, truth be told. But I wanted to maintain internet connectivity, especially if a work emergency came up for one of us (blogging isn’t a full-time job for us).

Connecting to the internet was pretty simple with a package, and we found the speeds to be more than acceptable. We tried it at multiple times of the day and in multiple locations, but the speeds were consistent enough.

Really, we don’t have any complaints to give about the internet.

Sharing internet access with others

Switching which device uses the package is simple

Let’s say you wanted to share internet access with someone else by only paying for one package. Or you needed to work on a laptop at times and be on your phone otherwise. Well, you’ll be happy to know it’s quite simple to switch between accounts. Just log into the device you want to now have internet, and direct it to “Switch Devices”.

What I liked specifically was that the splash screen came up without fail when you reconnected to the Carnival Wi-Fi signal. It’s incredibly annoying when it doesn’t do that, as it can be hard switching devices at that point. So if you wanted to sometimes use the free Wi-Fi and sometimes share a package with someone else, know that the system won’t lock you into one or the other.

It’s easy to use a travel router to extend access to other devices

I won’t get into specific IT guidance on how to set it up, but I do want to point out that I found it simple to make my travel router work. I always recommend to practice using it at home before you have to try it for real. Despite how it might seem, using a travel router isn’t something that will take a lot of inherent IT knowledge to set up. When you do get it set up, you just need to log onto your Wi-Fi signal and then the splash screen will show as normal for you to sign in.

Speeds behind the travel router are reduced. That’s just the nature of the game. Speeds ended up averaging about a third of what they were when not behind the travel router. But it also enabled you to splice the signal to multiple devices. The other thing to note is since the travel router needs constant power, we generally just left it in the room. And that was sufficient for us. We could have used a power bank to take it around, but we had little need for internet when doing activities on the ship.

Based on how easy it was to set up the travel router, we would never consider paying the price for the Premium Multi-Device package at $84/day.

Bottom line

We found the Carnival Wi-Fi internet to be pretty darn simple. While other experiences were a mixed bag on the Carnival Horizon, we loved the simplicity of using their internet. And we were also thrilled with being able to successfully use our travel router. Overall, a very positive experience.

Stay tuned for the next installment where we’ll look at our confusing time trying to use the AT&T cruise package.

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