Cruises are a great way to unwind and relax. But if you're not careful, you're in for a nasty and quite costly shock once you return home. Avoid this costly cruise ship mistake and thank us later.
Some cruise ship passengers, upon returning home, are shocked by the price of their cell phone bills. One person ended up with $1,300 after all was said and done. It's all do to roaming charges. Your phone will continue to download stuff in the background, leading to high cell phone charges.
Cruise Ship Rule
To avoid this, consider putting your phone in airplane mode. You should also monitor your kids' phones to make sure that they're not secretly using costly data. This is isn't something the cruise ship company's will advertise up front. So it's important to know ahead of time.
On a cruise ship forum, one person complained, "I know nothing about how the international charges work for incoming calls/texts, and we told my mom, who was keeping our 5 and 7 yr olds to leave a voice mail if there is a prob, we would turn on the phone at the ports and call her from our stateroom for $1.99/min if need be. Well I turned on my phone in Roatan and about 6 texts with picture attachments and lord knows how many emails started coming through, and then I got a txt from ATT that said I was being charged $19.95 per 1MB of data. Um, yeah, I was freaking out! LOL I was envisioning a $200 charge, but I just called ATT and it turned out to be $12. What a relief!!!!"
Meanwhile, another didn't keep an eye on their daughter's phone. They wrote, "My daughter has a smart phone so it receives data. She kept it charging when she was on the ship but never turned it off. It kept receiving data the whole cruise. We were lucky we only had a $2000 bill when I got home. Called Verizon and ended up paying $60. Our last cruise we called Verizon to buy a plan for the cruise. It was something like $30 for the week and 3 ports we went to also added a fee for every minute you used the phone. The fee was around $2-$3 each minute. So we removed the battery when we got into Tampa, no phone, no computer for one week-wonderful! Priceless really."
Remember to keep your phone in airplane mode to avoid any outrageous charges.
