Royal Caribbean's Independence of the Seas Wi-Fi

Recently, I got to sail on Royal Caribbean's Independence of the Seas cruise ship. While on-board, I tried out the ship's Wi-Fi and found out what the prices were for its various Wi-Fi plans. The plans can vary from ship to ship and, that was the case in this instance.

Independence of the Seas offers 4 plans:

1 hour plan - $29.95
1 day plan - $59.95
Unlimited plan for 1 device - $189.95
Unlimited plan for 2 devices - $229.95

With the 1 hour plan, you get 60 minutes that you can use at various times. This is different from their 1 day plan which for some reason must be used continuously for 24 hours. I confess I didn't like that I had to use the 1 day plan all in 1 day and, I wouldn't recommend it. With the unlimited plans, the big thing there is how many devices you can have hooked up to the Wi-Fi at one time. With the unlimited plan for 2 devices, you can have 2 devices hooked up at the same time. This would be handy for families. If you're on a long cruise and surf the web a lot, the unlimited plans are definitely the way to go. I do wish Royal Caribbean offered the unlimited plans on more of their ships. Right now, it's only available on this ship, Allure of the Seas and Navigator of the Seas. I would've greatly preferred it over the 1,600 plan I got on their Legend of the Seas ship.

For Crown & Anchor members, the Diamond discount is $29.95. This will get you 1 hour of free Wi-Fi or $29.95 off one of the other plans. I'm Diamond and since I wasn't staying for the whole cruise, I took the 1 hour free Wi-Fi. I wasn't wiped out with this offer otherwise. $160 (after the discount) for unlimited Wi-Fi still isn't cheap in my book though it is way better than what Royal Caribbean has offered before.

One final difference I found between the Wi-Fi on Independence of the Seas and Legend of the Seas was you could hook up to the Wi-Fi using the Mozilla Firefox browser. The sheet with the information on the ship's Wi-Fi states that Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari version 3 or higher will work on their Wi-Fi. Internet Explorer as far as I know works on all of Royal Caribbean's ships and apparently is their preferred browser. On Legend of the Seas, I tried logging on Mozilla Firefox and, the page would lock up at the log-in point. On Independence of the Seas, the log-in page worked fine. As I don't have the Safari browser, I didn't test that one. It would be nice if they added the Chrome browser to the list of browsers you can use.

Lastly, the Wi-Fi is available throughout the ship. This is one of the upgrades Royal Caribbean is doing to its entire fleet and will encourage people to use the Wi-Fi. It's a real pain to have to search for a hotspot on the ship. Happy surfing on the Internet all!