Royal Caribbean bans cruise travel hack used by thousands to get around ‘crazy’ Wi-Fi costs

One of the world’s largest cruise lines has banned a nifty item used by thousands of passengers every year as a way to bring down costs.

The travel hack was used by many travelling with Royal Caribbean; the world’s second-largest cruise line carrying millions of passengers across the globe every single year.

But now it’s off limits, with reports of the item in question being confiscated in recent weeks.

Everyone loves a holiday hack, whether that’s the best thing to do on a cruise ship that you’re missing out on or simply how to bring down costs.

But one particular way to bring down costs is now not permitted on any Royal Caribbean ship, with it banned under ‘cybersecurity and deliberate electronic crime’ reasoning.

What has Royal Caribbean banned?

It’s all to do with Wi-Fi. And if you know anything about cruise ships, you’l know how expensive it can be.

One Royal Caribbean cruise ship worker, Bryan James, revealed just how expensive it is, costing him $12 for ‘just three hours coverage’. That only got him a download speed of less than 2MB per second, too.

“It can then worsen depending on how many people are using the service,” Bryan explained.

One YouTube user posted: “What I am hearing is that, if you are working on a cruise ship, you should download a tonne of videos to a hard drive for entertainment.”

A second wrote: “$12 a day for internet? Crazy.”

Considering the average download speed in the UK is now almost 70MB per second, and the average monthly cost being less than £30, it’s not the most competitive.

For customers, prices start at $15.99 (£12.50) per device, per day, according to the cruise line’s own website.

To get around big costs, especially if you’ve got multiple devices, passengers have brought on travel routers, which when connected to a Wi-Fi network, act as a portable Wi-Fi network for you to connect multiple devices to.

That way, you’re paying for one fee but able to connect as many devices as the router will allow you.

The routers are being confiscated (Paul Hennessy/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Enforcing the ban

In reality, travel routers have always been banned on Royal Caribbean ships. The issue was that it was really difficult to stop it.

Taking the matter more seriously, the router has been officially added to the banned item list on the cruise line’s website.

The reason for this is due to potential links to ‘cybersecurity’ issues and ‘deliberate electronic crime’.

Now, multiple social media groups from the cruising community have reported that these routers are being confiscated at the point of boarding when luggage is scanned.

Carnival Cruise Line has also put routers on its prohibited items list, with passengers reporting having their devices taken from them upon check-in.

LADbible contacted Royal Caribbean for comment on the travel router ban.