Most of us know that because of the equipment and services involved, Wi-Fi access on cruise ships isn’t cheap. The basic package on Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL), called Voyage Wi-Fi Pass, costs $30 a day, per device.
That standard data plan on NCL, as on most cruise ships, does the job just fine if you’re not planning to sit in your cabin watching TV on your phone or laptop.
With the $30/day Wi-Fi plan, you can browse the Web, post words and images, text people, and upload images, and, up to now, the plan has been fast enough to let you flick past the short videos you encounter while scrolling the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and X.
Understandably, the biggest data hogs and video-intense users—people who want to stream entertainment on Netflix and YouTube or watch live sporting events—have had to pay more to account for the extra bandwidth required. Those users have to upgrade to the Streaming Voyage package and pay another $10 for a total of $40 a day ($39.99 to be precise). For a one-week cruise, that’ll add nearly $280 per device, plus tax.
But now, NCL customers on the cheapest Wi-Fi plan are getting much less for their money.
Norwegian has abruptly decided to throttle the more affordable Voyage Pass plan.
Can you watch social media video on Norwegian’s Wi-Fi plans?
Signaling a reduction in basic Wi-Fi services among the major cruise lines (let’s see if other lines follow suit), NCL has stripped the ability to watch simple social media clips from the cheaper Voyage plan.
No more Facebook Stories, Instagram Reels, X (Twitter) videos, Snapchat Stories, and short videos on similar platforms. Last month you could watch those brief video nuggets, but on your next cruise, they won’t load. (The service reduction affects the crew, too.)
Some might interpret this change as the cruise lines finding a way to squeeze more cash out of onboard purchases. Norwegian Cruise Line reported record revenue in the second quarter of 2025.
Others might see the change as a sign that incessant doomscrolling is slowing down the technology, so here’s a welcome discouragement from spending your vacation glued to your phone.
Either way, if you’re buying Norwegian’s most affordable Wi-Fi package with the expectation that you’ll still be able to follow your friends’ Reels on Instagram—after all, the Web is full of trip reports from passengers who said they could do just that using the cheap plan—that functionality has been taken away.
Even before this change, some users found that NCL’s cheaper Voyage plan could be iffy when it came to loading social media video quickly, including on TikTok. But at least the service worked, even if sometimes it took patience.
Now the cruise line is intentionally and explicitly excluding social media videos of all types unless you agree to pay as much money as someone who spends their entire vacation bingeing The Summer I Turned Pretty by the pool.
According to NCL, the basic plan will still allow video communications such as iMessage, FaceTime, and Zoom.
May we introduce you to books and an automated out-of-office message?
