Put your smartphone in airplane mode.
As TheStreet warns: “It’s not uncommon to hear horror stories of first-time cruisers who neglected to put their phones in airplane mode, only to come home to hundreds of dollars (or more) in various charges.”
First-time cruisers need to know that once you sail away from land, you’re “roaming,” which incurs dramatically elevated charges. Worse, you’re roaming on a cruise ship, which charges you more than what you’re charged in most international countries. On a cruise ship, you can easily pay $3 per minute for a call or $20 per measly megabyte of data.
By simply checking your email, costs can rapidly mount to astronomical levels. AT&T publishes an entire document warning you about the many ways you can drain your bank account doing simple things with your phone—but most customers never read the info.
Verizon now sells a Cruise Daily Pass granting unlimited text, calls, and data on the seas for $20 per day per line—but the package is not available on all cruise ships. Plus, you have to make sure to sign up for it. If you forget to subscribe for your trip, you’ll be paying the ugly roaming fees instead.
AT&T sells customers a few versions of a Cruise Package that includes a mere 100MB to 1GB over 30 days for $60–$100. That isn’t much data at all, and if you go over, the carrier levies an additional $10 per 100MB. Considering how much data nearly everything uses, that’s hardly a good deal. Even if you bought this, you’d still have to be incredibly sparing with your usage.
As of early 2025, AT&T’s International Day Pass includes about 400 ships and costs $20 a day for data, voice, and texting. If you forget to sign up and try to use your phone, the carrier will automatically enroll you into that $20-a-day charge, which can add up if you’re not expecting it.
To avoid all of that, put your phone in airplane mode every time you board the ship. You can then use a Wi-Fi signal—by spending money for the onboard Wi-Fi package, of course. On land, you can temporarily turn off airplane mode and then you’ll be subject to the usage terms your carrier charges for that destination. Just don’t forget to switch back to airplane mode when you return to the ship.
Avoid the ship’s medical center.
In January 2025, you might have read about the cruise ship guest who came down with the flu, visited his ship’s medical center—and wound up with $47,000 in charges. You can buy a funeral for less!
Unfortunately, that experience was not unique among cruise ship infirmaries. This poor chap was hit with a bill for $2,500. This woman was asked to pay $5,500 for treatment for a bacterial infection.
Nobody tells first-time cruisers that the medical center on ships is generally not free. Even if you have travel insurance (here’s how to get that), the limits of your policy may still be exceeded by what you’d be charged at the ship’s clinic.
After giving you a hefty bill for medical services, cruise lines will simply advise you to file a claim with your own insurer if you want your money back.
That’s a hard way to learn that, sure, cruise lines have state-of-the-art health centers staffed with fully accredited medical personnel—but those facilities are usually run by third parties responsible for staffing, equipment, pricing, and billing.
The better course of action is to make sure your insurance’s coverage is expansive enough for whatever the infirmary might charge you—or, if possible, to avoid the clinic entirely.
Reject the drink packages—unless you’re a big drinker.
Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math.
Carnival Cruise Line’s Cheers! drinks package costs nearly $83 a day, and it excludes room service, mini bars, and even drinks ordered on the line’s private island. And you must buy the package for every day of your cruise. And everyone who shares the cabin with you must also buy the package, a common requirement among cruise lines. And you’re limited to 15 drinks a day.
Consider that cocktails on Carnival cost about $11-$18, with most priced in the lower part of that range, and beers are around $8.
Unless you can drink more than seven cocktails or 10 beers in a single day—probably not advisable even if you can—then you’d actually lose money buying Carnival’s drinks package. So just pay à la carte, and spend less.
Carnival’s Bottomless Bubbles soda-and-juice package costs $8.20 per day for kids and $11.21 per day for adults. Considering those beverages cost $2.75 each if bought without a plan, kids would have to drink at least three Pepsis a day and adults would have to down at least four on each and every day of their vacation to avoid losing money. Do you drink that much?
Novice cruisers can do the math themselves for the cruise line they’re taking, but the results will be similar.
Buy shore excursions from someone other than the cruise line.
When ships are in port, you’re on your own to find things to fill your day. Luxury cruise lines might include shore excursions for free, but the mass-market cruise lines are only too glad to sell you all your guided activities, and, grasping blindly for what’s most convenient, first-time cruisers make a few classic mistakes with those shore excursions.
For one, vacationers tend to buy too many. By the third or fourth day of touring, they wish they’d allowed themselves more time to relax and explore destinations on their own.
More critically, they rely on the cruise lines’ excursion menu for everything they do. Those tours are notoriously expensive. The cruise lines routinely charge two to three times more than what tours cost if booked independently; in the last year or so, those already-high prices have ballooned.
There’s a lot of debate in the cruising community about whether to buy excursions from the cruise line or from third parties. But if your goal is to save money, there’s no debate: You can often buy the exact same activities—often using the same talent pool of tour guides—for much less from someone else.
You can reserve tours yourself using sites like Viator.com, ShoreExcursionsGroup.com, VentureAshore.com, or a tour company recommended by a local tourist bureau. All of them will be used to meeting cruise ships, so it won’t be hard to meet up with your tour once you disembark.
But if you do purchase a shore excursion from an operator outside the cruise line, there’s another thing most first-time cruisers need to know: If your independently booked tour is late in returning, your ship is likely to depart without you.
This rarely happens, and some third-party tour brokers like ShoreExcursioneer.com guarantee you’ll be back in time or else you get up to $500 per person for transportation to catch up with your ship.
Still, fear of missing the boat is a big reason many passengers pay the extreme activity rates offered by the cruise lines. If you’re late on a shore trip sold to you by the cruise line, then the line will either hold the ship for you or pay the expense of allowing you to meet up with the ship later on.
Skip the art auction.
There’s much to discuss about the reputation of the companies that run the galleries on cruise ships—look up “Park West” and “lawsuits” to take a deep dive into that netherworld.
It should suffice to say that the global art market news platform Artnet reports that the prices people pay for the artwork they find on cruise ships are often much, much higher than what the land-based market supports for the same artist.
Artnet reporter Sarah Cascone was on a cruise in 2019 when a certain painting by an extremely prolific pop artist was promoted by the ship gallery staff—supplied by a third party, the aforementioned Park West—as being worth $23,500.
“Less than 30 seconds later, the work was sold for $20,700,” Cascone wrote.
There was just one giant problem: Only two paintings by the same artist had ever fetched more than $20,000 at any land-based auction, according to Artnet, meaning the cruise ship passenger had almost certainly paid a lot more than was necessary.
The value of art is subjective. Perhaps the buyer was happy with the amount paid. But put politely, unless you’re a true art expert, cruise ship art auctions put you at risk of paying unnecessarily obscene amounts—and probably a lot more than you can ever hope to make back if you choose to sell the work later.
And here’s a sixth rule for free: Never schedule your flight to the cruise port to arrive the same day that your cruise is scheduled to leave. If you’re delayed, you miss the ship. Always arrive at least a day in advance.
Do you have other cost-conscious warnings for first-time cruise passengers? Share them at Facebook.com/FrommersTravelGuides.