Princess Internet Ripoff

[cruiserdenny]

My family got off the Caribbean Princess on March 25th. A great cruise on a great ship. Although I did not have any problems in dealing with the internet attendant myself, I observed him being much less than "Princessy" to a few people who were frustrated with the low quality of internet service. I am sure that it has to be frustrating to have to oversee a service that performs so poorly and deal with cruisers who have much better internet connections at home. I have come to expect less than quality internet service on ships and when I cannot take it any more, I will stop going online while cruising. I got the $100 package that offered .40 per minute and by registering on the first day, I got 30 extra minutes. Not bad, when you can pay as much as .75 per minute. That takes a little of the sting out when the computer locks up. The attendant had somewhat thin skin and being in charge of the internet cafe on the Caribbean Princess takes someone with alligator skin and the understanding of an angel.

[ldoc31]

My bet is the OP was attempting to print out Southwest Airline boarding passes. Those you can only print 24 hrs prior to you flight. The reason he wanted to print it out the night before was so he could be in group A and board with the first group. Southwest has open seating and boards in three groups.

 

Sounds like it became pretty expensive just for him to get to the head of the line. ;)

 

The OP said US Air--not Southwest. I guess that shoots your head of the line theory.

[Hanah481]

We were trying to print boarding passes for flying U.S. Air. You can only print them 24 hours before your flight. Has anyone ever been to the Fort Lauderdale airport lately??? What a joke if you don't have your passes already printed. We had to wait lin line for close to 3 hours. If you have your boarding passes already you can check your bags at curbside. Next time if I ever go thru Fort Lauderdale I'll stay an extra day and hope I can print my passes at a hotel. Our next cruse takes us to Hawaii out of LA. We arrive back on a Tuesday. Hopefully LAX will not be as busy on a Tuesday. I realize that the connection at sea is not the greatest so they should not have raised their price from 35 cents per minute to 75 cents a minute unless they have a connection that is at least reasonable. Just my opinion.....

[phillipahain]

Since you can only print out Airline Boarding Passes 24 hours before a flight it is indeed nessecary generally to do this onboard ship

given the slow internet connections onboard and the 75cents a minute charge Cruise Lines are coining it in

[PescadoAmarillo]

Frankly, the whole internet at sea thing works great when it works, which is only part of the time. Couple that with charges like we had on our last cruise...we check our on board account periodically through a cruise (especially a 10 night cruise and longer). On the final morning of our first cruise (doing B2Bs), there were 3 charges totalling over $70 that we didn't recognize. Even stranger, they were dated for the middle of the cruise, but printed at the end of our statement. A passenger services person told us (after we waited in line for a long time on the last morning, something we try to avoid like the plague) that they were charges for wireless internet. Wireless internet????? We didn't even bring along a laptop, a Blackberry, a wifi cell phone...nothing. We also questioned why they didn't show up on our account for 5 days. In the end, they were (rightfully) removed, but it was obvious to us that someone had used the internet and somehow it got charged to our account.

[southbayer]

Having read all the concerns about this, the only thing you could still do is to try it. I'm the type of person who likes to have things set up in advance. I want to get to the airport with docs already in hand. So whatever you do, make sure you have at least 30 min of internet left to do this, as you can only check in 24 hrs before your flight.

[Hanah481]

30 minutes time saved is great, but still probably not enough..... I doubt it will be better by the time we sail again next March but there is always a SMALL chance....