Rhine River Cruise; Internet Access?
 

My wife and I have booked a Rhine River cruise in October.
Do these boats have reasonably priced WiFi access, or should I buy a GSM-to-USB dongle for $30 and a local SIM?

Viking has free internet on their cruises. I don't know who you are going with.

The best thing to do is just google (or whatever) the name of your cruise line and internet access to go to their internet access page if they have one. Some do for free, some do for a charge, some don't at all.

It will probably be a shared 3G connection with anybody else using it, and it may or may not work if they have to drop something to get under a bridge, so if connection is vital to you or speed is important you may want to bring your own.

I've done that (actually emailed them). The cruise line company says there is no WiFi on the boat we're booked on.

If you want to go with cellular data then I would consider an unlocked hotspot. They cost more but you get a lot more value out of them. I own a Zoom We3g but lately have been been using an unlocked Android phone with FoxFi. Since you will be going through multiple countries, I would suggest considering iPhonetrip or XCom global.

I'm having a senior moment here. I've previously posted about a company that resells Vodafone Italy service with a real good roaming rate for multiple countries.

The problem with a multicountry cruise is that get the SIM cards in each country can be a real hassle. You need to either need to pull permission to disembark at the harbor when the ship docks (before the organized excursions take place and race back to the ship, eat roaming rates, or buy a bunch of SIMs on the internet and activate them as you cruise into the particular country). Your time on a cruise really isn't your own and that is a problem and makes the conventional advice "just get a sim in each country" not really work.

Stu

Update date: The "sometimers" ended -- the company I couldn't think of is: http://www.europasim.com/en_GB

If the boat has none, then you are going do have to DIY!

Have you checked the sticky at the top of this forum for recommendations for the country you need?

If they don't offer it then I would say the best way is just to get it while you are docked in the various ports. I wouldn't spend the time and effort to get sims and modems and the rest unless there was some vital reason I needed it on the ship. It's going to be much easier to find it in the various towns you stop in probably.

Here's an article with more info on the "Xcom Global" solution mentioned by Dubai Stu.

Go with the local SIM. Most of your time will be in Germany? When we did a trip to Vienna and Munich last spring I found it very easy to get a SIM for my iPhone at a T-Mobile store in Vienna, I just walked in and handed them my phone, they put a SIM into it, made the whole thing work and I paid some amount for the data plan. I then could share the hotspot with my wife.

Then when we got to Germany we repeated the process. I was not successful in finding a reasonable solution that covered all of the countries.


Scott

^^
Not a river cruise, for us, but a regular cruise that stopped in ports along the European coast. I didn't need continual internet access but wanted to catch up with email at least once a day. At every single port we quickly found a coffee shop where, for the price of a cup of coffee, we had free unlimited and fast wireless access. By the time the coffee was gone we'd both had our internet fix and had any urgent email taken care of.