Poor Customer Relations and Even Poorer Wi-Fi

[alanhrobertson]

What spoiled my holiday was my grievance about the speed and reliability of the ridiculously expensive wi-fi service on offer. I expressed my concern to the CR staff within 24 hours. No apology but asked to fill in a feedback form. No one contacted us during the remaining 10 days of the cruise to discuss the matter with us. We e-mailed Customer Services and got an automatic response saying that they would respond with 28 days. No one has yet responded. Our grievance is that we felt the "Xcelerate High-Speed Internet" was a seriously misleading description for what turned out to be a very slow wi-fi service. We felt the product was mis-sold to us and are extremely annoyed that no one has contacted us so far to address our concerns. The wi-fi issue, along with the shore excursion costs, made us feel that Celebrity Cruises and more concerned with taking your money rather than responding swiftly the customer concerns. We will not be travelling Celebrity again and will certainly tell all our friends who we discuss our holiday with, about our very expensive mistake in signing up for the very sub-standard wi-fi service.

[chemmo]

Did you go back to the CR desk to say no improvement? How did they respond?

[Fish Lover]

What spoiled my holiday was my grievance about the speed and reliability of the ridiculously expensive wi-fi service on offer. I expressed my concern to the CR staff within 24 hours. No apology but asked to fill in a feedback form. No one contacted us during the remaining 10 days of the cruise to discuss the matter with us. We e-mailed Customer Services and got an automatic response saying that they would respond with 28 days. No one has yet responded. Our grievance is that we felt the "Xcelerate High-Speed Internet" was a seriously misleading description for what turned out to be a very slow wi-fi service. We felt the product was mis-sold to us and are extremely annoyed that no one has contacted us so far to address our concerns. The wi-fi issue, along with the shore excursion costs, made us feel that Celebrity Cruises and more concerned with taking your money rather than responding swiftly the customer concerns. We will not be travelling Celebrity again and will certainly tell all our friends who we discuss our holiday with, about our very expensive mistake in signing up for the very sub-standard wi-fi service.

 

 

With regard to the WiFi, I don't know what you could possibly expect from the ship out in the middle of the ocean and a ship full of users. Did they guarantee a specific bandwidth be available to you? Also, what exactly do expect as a response? Then you causally throw in the cost of excursions. If you didn't like the price, then why purchase them. Surely you knew where you were traveling for quite some time and had the option of arranging for excursions that were not associated with Celebrity. I have zero sympathy about that at all.

 

Personally, and this is my opinion alone, I have no clue as to why people need to be connected 24 hr/day. I am connected and available around the clock while working. The very last thing I want while on vacation is to be available.

[cruiserhal]

What am I missing??? How could slow wifi spoil your holiday?

[patty1955]

One of the benefits of Cruise Critic is the ability to research any area of cruising that's important to you. Did you research Celebrity's wifi here before booking your cruise?

Wifi on cruise ships is notoriously slow, especially in more isolated areas. "High-Speed" is a relative term.

[hcat]

All the internet packages are quite pricey so maybe OP expected something better from the advertised hi speed internet Wi Fi...I think there was a big PR push at one point touting how good it would be,,

 

....on some cruises the tech folks give back many minutes due to very slow internet ..can take forever just to send an e mail...

 

We get many minutes from E plus but us it only to check on home & pet and for our boarding passes,..would not rely on it for very much more,,,although on a recent cruise DH was actually able to log into and update an online game he plays. He was pleasantly surprised!

[eandj]

We have cruised on four different cruise lines and two river cruise lines. And I can honestly say that not one of them moved along like ours does at home on my desk top computer. I think it is unrealistic to expect the same while on a moving ship with 3 thousand or more people logging in and out.

I actually found the customer service to be helpful and on one occasion when I forgot to log off, they were able to restore my foolish wasted time with no questions asked. Since I was warned of that, it was my mistake and I wasn't due anything. That's pretty good service, in my eyes. What were you expecting them to do? Refund all your time or money? Did you try using the computers in the lounge during slower times?

 

To say you won't cruise a line because of the internet speed, sounds like you just wanted to move on anyway.

 

BTW, there are lines which charge more for their excursions than X. Most people who are concerned with cost and/or choice of ship tours, choose to book their own tours with private companies. Super easy to do. I suggest you try that on any cruise line you choose next.

 

Sorry you were disappointed.

[flyingv4me]

Welcome to Cruise Critic!

[CruisersTimesThree]

I can't imagine an entire vacation would be ruined because of internet speed!

You had to know that it wouldn't be the same as internet at home considering the amount of people accessing it at any given time.

Although slow, we had no problems with wi-fi on our Summit cruise in Aug.

it's not like we needed to be connected 24/7, but was fine for checking email, looking in and uploading pics to Facebook, and even worked well when we used Facebook messenger for phone calls.

On a side note, I have suspicions that you have some connection to the person who posted a couple of weeks ago holding back a review because of a problem onboard and were threatening a bad review if things didn't go your way.

That persons evasive post drew many negative comments.

I find it odd that your 1st ever post here on CC is bashing the cruise line [emoji848]

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Forums

[bigbenboys]

In my years of cruising. The wifi is much faster than it used to be. I'm able to Skype and friends have done face time. Also you need to find where the strongest signal is on the ship. The bandwidth was better when people were on tours. As to tours. We do take Celebrity tours mostly. They do cost more, sometimes it is about convenience.

 

Sent from my XT1635-01 using Forums mobile app

[Zoedokey]

I wonder what kind of profit margin Celebrity makes on these packages. They are so expensive.

[ghstudio]

Some folks find the time for their family to cruise even though they are in a job where they do need computer access. Celebrity really does promote hi speed internet and that would lead me (and likely the OP) to think that the speeds would be "reasonably fast". One problem is that everyone defines what's fast.....there is no statement by celebrity nor one by the OP on the throughput..internet upload/download speeds. Having spent many vacation days on a computer terminal, I can understand why the OP might have been frustrated....and yes, it's partially Celebrity's fault for setting the expectation in their marketing.

 

As far as excursion costs...yes, all the cruise lines add a profit on top of what you could book the same cruise for yourself. That's why many of us book our own excursions. Of course if you are going to small towns where there are limited excursions, the ship books them all....that's happened to us on a number of cruises to small ports.

 

Yes, celebrity is in business to make money....and as long as passengers fill their ships then I guess they can raise their prices to whatever they want. The only control is what passengers are willing to pay.

[CaroleSS]

Personally, and this is my opinion alone, I have no clue as to why people need to be connected 24 hr/day. I am connected and available around the clock while working. The very last thing I want while on vacation is to be available.

 

 

I'm sure that the Millennials amongst won't agree (am I showing my age here?), but I am with you! I go on vacation and have no interest whatsoever in being 'connected'!

 

 

BUT....I can understand how speeds could be arduously slow - narrow bandwidth and lots of users. The cost is undoubtedly high as the initial investment was high. Prices might come down over time and speeds might increase, but my suggestion is to put the electronics down, look up and enjoy the scenery!

 

 

YMMV

[TFLG]

Don't expect any other cruise line to be any better. I've been on 4 cruise lines and the Wifi is universally bad. Time of day and location on the ship does make a huge difference. The internet cafe is usually the best especially using the ships computers. The central atriums are usually the next best areas. Beyond that it's hit or miss. Speed seems best early morning, late evening or on port days when most people are off ship. The worst times are on port days right about the time the ship sails. It seems everyone wants to post their daily adventures on facebook just about then. Also shore excursions are similarly priced across cruise lines. There may be slight variations but none of them are a bargain. Book on your own, not through the ship if you want to save as much as possible.

[Mynki]

I'm sure that the Millennials amongst won't agree (am I showing my age here?), but I am with you! I go on vacation and have no interest whatsoever in being 'connected'!

 

Some people are lucky and have a lot of good stuff going on whilst on vacation that they want to keep up with. ;)

 

Anyone who is used to fast broadband will find the ships broadband more like using an old dial up connection. I agree with ghstudio that the marketing is disingenuous and misleading.

[jelayne]

To the OP I'm sorry you found the Internet service to be less than you expected. We find the Internet to be much faster and more reliable than it had been. While not as fast as at home, we are able to post video's, email photo's, check and post to social media and read the local newspaper without problems-something that was difficult if not impossible in the not too distant past. We don't do work while cruising so our need for Internet may be different that yours.

 

We are on day 23 of a 28 day trip and have just a few occasions where the connection was lost or slow and that was in the Falkland Islands and Antarctica.

[daydreamer16]

We were on the Silhouette in Europe in September and the internet service was very poor. We purchased two 1 hour sessions to check in at home and check-in for our flight,and I feel it was a waste of money since we had to go to the ilounge to get it to work. Luckily we were not too far from there. On the night before disembarkation, we had to go to the concierge and use her computer to check-in for our flight since we ran out of time, and she said her connection was poor too. Of course she wasn't paying for internet service like we were!

[jagoffee]

OP, sorry to hear that Celebrity's internet performance spoiled your holiday cruise. The cost of the cruise must have been much greater than the cost of your internet, therefore it is really a shame.

 

The last couple of cruises I have found the internet performance to be more than acceptable. I was able to FaceTime my grandkids without any issues. But even if it was not I would not allowed it to spoil my cruise.

 

I seriously doubt that you will receive an response from Celebrity that is acceptable, as you have said your cruise was spoiled. That is something that cannot be changed retroactively.

 

With your priority on internet performance I would be reluctant to cruise on any cruise line.

 

Good luck

[cruisestitch]

OP, did you go to the Ilounge to talk to the people there? They might have been able to give you some suggestions to make your experience better, suggestions like logging on at off-peak times, for instance. Customer Relations doesn't run the wi-fi service, but the people who are in the Ilounge are very experienced and can often help. Did you go there?

 

You don't say where you were cruising, but at this time of year, it might have been to South America or Antarctica, where service is often spotty. Where were you? In the Caribbean? Australia? South America?

[Lastdance]

I guess that I have been quite lucky with the internet in Europe, but maybe not so much for our TA this April. Yes, at times you do have to find a better location and time, but it is what it is. Having said that, I do understand where you are coming from...false advertising maybe? However, you have to be fairly persistent with any issue onboard to get it resolved...at least that is my perspective. Cruise lines are all about the bottom line, so if you want to be heard, keep up the persistence.

On another note, it took me quite a long time today to inquire as to why Celebrity decided to charge me an extra $100; it is still unsolved...

Edited March 1, 2017 by Lastdance

[RDC1]

Keep in mind that Internet service on cruise ships is somewhat limited by things called the laws of physics. When you access the internet in land many of your connects have very short latency periods (the time it takes a packet to reach its destination. The average ground based latency is 29.6 milliseconds. When you are on a cruise ship you are dealing with satellite communications. That means that the signal has to travel from the ship to the satellite and then back to a ground station where it connects to the ground internet. A satellite latency is 20 times longer or around 680 milliseconds (mostly due to a little limitation called SPEED of LIGHT which is also a limit for radio frequency transmissions). Now normal network communications handshaking means that the sending computer sends a number of packets, then stops sending until it receives an acknowledgement (a bit simplified). So latency dramatically impacts the maximum performance of satellite communications compared to land. There are tricks that will allow the network to do better by modifying of the handshaking is done, changing how acknowledgements are provided, buffering approaches, etc.

 

However, while these help and the Celebrity internet takes advantage of a lot of these approaches, (especially for large downloads vs highly interactive connections), they cannot overcome all of the limitations introduced by satellite communications and as a result ship board wifi and internet will always be slow compared to just about any land based, including cell phones.

 

The new ship based systems are considerably faster than the old systems, they have substantially increased bandwidth. But while you can do things to handle the bandwidth, there are limits in things that can improve latency. So if you are doing things where you initiate a function and then let the computer handle things you will will reasonable performance. If you are doing things that involve frequent operator interactions latency will show up in a big way.

[easyboy]

Too bad your cruise' internet speed did not live up to your expectation. Whenever we sail, we don't actually expect the speed we have on our wifi at home. We just use it to check emails where speed is not really critical for us.

[easyboy]

Too bad your cruise' internet speed did not live up to your expectation. Whenever we sail, we don't actually expect the speed we have on our wifi at home. We just use it to check emails where speed is not really critical for us.

[caribill]

With regard to the WiFi, I don't know what you could possibly expect from the ship out in the middle of the ocean and a ship full of users.

 

From the Celebrity web site" Xcelerate High Speed Internet at sea. With our newly enhanced Xcelerate high-speed Internet, you can now share memories with video calling and messaging like Skype and FaceTime, browse web sites faster, and sit back with your favorite movies or shows with streaming video capabilities.

So, yes, with words like "high speed Internet at sea" I do expect a reasonably fast Internet speed. It does not say "high speed Internet as long as you are the only user."

 

 

Personally, and this is my opinion alone, I have no clue as to why people need to be connected 24 hr/day. I am connected and available around the clock while working. The very last thing I want while on vacation is to be available.

 

 

No, I do not need to be connected 24 hours a day. 15 minutes a day is all I need, even at slow speeds.

 

But Celebrity only sells unlimited packages at rates around $23/day. That is quite a bit to pay for 15 minutes, even at sea.

 

And there a number of reasons to have some Internet time while on a cruise:

o Ability to have contact with ill friends and relatives

o Ability to have contact with shore excursion providers

o Ability for your credit card company to contact you if there is a problem (even though you notified them in advance where you would be traveling).

o etc.

[caribill]

When the first Royal Caribbean Displacement Of The Seas was launched, RCCL boasted that the ship had more Internet band width than all other existing cruise ships in the world had together.

 

The expectation could easily be that a corporate sister (Celebrity) which boasts of "high speed Internet at sea" would provide an similar Internet experience.