Princess Cruises Messenger App Reviews

Background: Cruise ships are generally a zone where everyone should turn off data roaming on their phones because of the inordinate cost of accessing the Internet using your cell phone on-board. However, nowadays most major ships, including Princess, have ship-wide wifi. On Princess ships, once you connect to the wifi network, it allow you (for free) to view cruise events, schedules, etc. This is very handy. However, if you want to access other websites, your email, or anything else on the Internet, you must purchase paid minutes. I suspect most people don’t bother since it is slow and expensive. However, on big cruise ships, a major problem is getting separated from your group and not being able to communicate with them. Thus, being able to quickly message them would be a boon. Cruise ship companies know this. This app has a very promising feature set - using only the *free* version of the ships wifi network you can communicate with anyone else on-board via text messages. The app is basically just a front-end to a website i.e. it stores your user name and password and then it opens a page in Safari on your iPhone. The *critical* feature of the app is supposed to be push notifications, where, when you’re lazing on-deck around the pool, you’ll get an audio alert or a vibration when someone has messaged you. You are also supposed to get a notifications screen alert so you can quickly see you have an unread message when your phone is sleeping and you hit the home button. But, in this version, PUSH NOTIFICATIONS DO NOT WORK!!! This essentially renders the app mostly useless in my opinion, since who wants to spend 30 seconds every few minutes to log into a webpage to see if you have a message? Until Princess fixes this, I do not recommend this “app”. Once they fix this, it will be useful.

Have downloaded and am looking forward to trying this app out. Unfortunately, it only works on specifically equipped Princess Cruises ships! So the actual review will need to wait until after my next cruise... ** IMPORTANT: PLEASE UPDATE APP DESCRIPTION TO INCLUDE CURRENT SUPPORTED SHIPS **

Not a good app at all. Only good at checking account balances and a partial listing of events. Not worrh the trouble to figure out how to set up contacts and gives NO PUSH NOTIFICATION if using another app like reading a book or listenng to music. No instructions n the app and the ship does not even provide basic written instructions other than to go to the nternet cafe. Which is a mad house on the first day of a cruise. Needs alot of work.

Not at all impressed. Basically all this app does is launch Safari. It was not reliable messaging. Had to log in constantly. Constantly locked up.

Do you have to pay for ships wi-fi to use this?

The whole point of this app is to get push notifications of the messages sent through the messenger web app. This never happened. We gave up on messaging all together because without the push we would never know if we got a message unless we opened it. Go figure as soon as we got to land and turned off airplane mode all the push notifications came in.....

This app is useless and shouldnt be called an app at all. It is the same as a safari shortcut on your iOS home screen that then takes you to the ships intranet webpage. No push notifications and therefore no Apple Watch support gives this a single star.

Lots of problems with a lot of things

Princess should be embarrassed by this. This is not an app at all it is essentially a link that opens safari and at that point you are just using a browser. The app portion of this is useless. The browser version is not much better but it has the ability to view the schedule of events on the ship and check your charges. You DO NOT need the app for that though just sign in in your browser.

I was able to get Push notifications by going into the phone or iPad settings and turning off notifications for the app, then turning it back on. But if your phone goes to sleep it seems to revert to no notifications again

No, its not an app. Its a shortcut to the princess website. We loved it for showing us the itinerary of the day. It allows you to highlight what you want to do and see and send it to someone else. You can also use it to send messages to other friends onboard. It wont alert you when you have a message so you have to open the app to see if anyone sent you a message. Coverage of the onboard wifi is not good in certain places aboard ship. No cost for use.

Usually you have to close and reopen it to refresh. No alerts to new messages, needs a tone, beep, or something as you have to open the app and look for a new message rather than just hear of its arrival. Therefore it is almost useless.

Useless as Is. No notifications an very slow

We just downloaded this app for our cruise last weekend. The messenger work maybe 50% of the time. You have to go to the website, the app just redirects you to the website. It needs push notifications terribly. if youre not refreshing you will not know if you have a message.

There is no notification when a message comes in. U have to be looking at the screen. It crashes constantly and has to be reloaded. We had 12 people trying to stay in communication about meals and excursions using this app, and it was completely hit or miss. You never knew. However, its your only choice on a princess cruise. Pick another cruise line or rate it low and maybe they will fix it.