Navigator APP... texting on ship?

[RHSTigerMom]

Just to clarify (won't let me edit). You only have to enter the unique code once, then it knows that code belongs to Joe, Jane, etc., so chatting is my name not code.

 

[aggiedog]

I'm with chunkymonkey. We were on the Magic in May/June. The app was great for the navigator, minimally useful for actually communicating for all the reasons listed. It would be hours sometimes before the text would come. It was also very difficult to set up, in that DCL had some very specific, and odd, takes on our names, which have to be entered exactly as the ship has them. (This might have been due to the lady that checked us in at the port? It took an hour to check the 8 of us in, and she was having serious issues understanding first/middle/last names for our group.) We ended up going down to guest services to have them walk us thru the set up.

 

[closetmickey]

It was quite easy for our family of five to set up the chat feature but the texting was sadly quite unreliable and inconsistent. I didn't believe the naysayers until I experienced it myself.

 

[VAB2013]

We are traveling with two other families on our spring cruise and this sounds like a great way to keep up with everyone. On our last cruise I was paranoid about incurring international data charges and I made my husband switch his phone to airplane mode, turn it off, and put it in the safe for the entire cruise. If we are going to use the app on our spring cruise, is there a way to tell that we have done everything correctly in order to avoid any charges? What should we check on the phone to be sure the correct things are turned off or on? Please don't laugh at me for this question

 

[erionm]

We are traveling with two other families on our spring cruise and this sounds like a great way to keep up with everyone. On our last cruise I was paranoid about incurring international data charges and I made my husband switch his phone to airplane mode, turn it off, and put it in the safe for the entire cruise. If we are going to use the app on our spring cruise, is there a way to tell that we have done everything correctly in order to avoid any charges? What should we check on the phone to be sure the correct things are turned off or on? Please don't laugh at me for this question

To use the DCL Navigator app, you need to put your phone into airplane mode and then connect to the ships WiFi Network (free for app use only). As long as your phone remains in airplane mode, you can't incur any roaming charges.

 

[cschaaf]

It was spotty for us as well on the Fantasy a few weeks ago. We had a mix of phones in our party - 5 iPhones, 1 Android (not sure of the model of phone), and 1 BlackBerry running the Android version of the app.

We did experience a lot of very delayed, and out of order, messages. You'd get a "We're headed to dinner" message on time, then two hours later, get that mornings "We're headed to breakfast" message from the same person.

• The iPhones seemed to work the most consistently, but they didn't get many vibrating notifications.
• The BB running the Android version of the app worked pretty well and got the vibrating notification intermittently - maybe half of the time. The BB supports Android apps, but usually not very well, so it was a nice surprise that it worked at all.
• The Android seemed to have more of the delayed messages than the others (then again, I probably chatted with him the most often, so it had more opportunities for delay). I didn't hear if his got the vibrating notifications or not.

It takes a bit of work to set up especially if you have a lot of users in your party, but nothing that we felt was overly complex. To add someone you need to know their unique ID. When you open the app, you are shown your unique ID. Once you have that, you need to tell it to the other person, they enter it and start a chat, then you are connected for the remainder of the trip.

The suggestion above to do all of that in the terminal is an awesome suggestion. We didn't know about the unique ID thing until we were separated and had no way to contact people.

It would have been nice to have an "Add a cabin" feature where you could add everyone in a cabin with one unique ID code.

Lastly, a Group Chat feature would be a great add. We had 7 people spread among 3 cabins on our trip. It would have been great to message them all with a single message as often, we were split into small sub-groups on the ship.

It definitely needs some work, but overall, we felt it was much better than nothing at all.

 

[MakiraMarlena]

If your phone is in airplane mode it will not incur any data charges. Just make sure it stays in airplane mode. You can turn on and access wifi aboard ship even with the phone in airplane mode.

 

[Starwind]

For those who have used to app to text other members of your party...how often did you use the Wave phones? I really don't think I will want to carry around the Wave phone with me while on board.

We used the Navigator app on our iphones and android tablets in November 2014. We never used the Wave phones and had no need to.

We were able to "text" between each other with few problems. Occasionally there was some delay in a text being received. Also, if one was logged into two devices (e.g. iphone and tablet) at the same time, there was no rhyme nor reason to which device received a text

We learned that it was better to only log in to ONE device for the chat function (e.g. iphone, since you would always have that ith you) (as well as other navigator functions) and then use the second device for the other navigator functions but NOT the chat function. Then the texting only goes to the one device

Before putting the iphone in airplane mode I turn off LTE and cellular data, just in case, THEN put it in Airplane mode. That way if I accidently or deliberately take it out of airplane mode it shouldn't be able to use cellular data.

While in airplane mode it does not connect to the cellular network, only the ship's wifi network. And if you do NOT log in to the wi-fi network, using the navigator app, including the "chat" function between people on board ship, does not incur charges.

SW

 

[TLPL]

Any update on this thread? I am wondering if any of the bugs been addressed since June.

 

[shelbell77]

We love this feature and I'm super excited they added group chat to it. On our WBPC whenever one of our table mates spotted the soft serve flavor of the day or dolphins they'd text everyone - but you had to do MULTIPLE texts. Now you can do just one! Plus I normally travel with a group of 10. Although we usually have cabins near each other I think group chat will be awesome for that too!

We don't use wave phones at all (but we also don't have kids and I think if you have kids in the clubs a parent still needs the wave phone for the club to contact them).

We had one person have trouble getting messages pushed to their phone - a few minutes at guest services and they helped configure the notifications settings and it worked smoothly after that. Only issue was when the ships systems went down one day - affected numerous things and one of them was texts not going through - but there were bigger issues like they couldn't process any sales in the bars or gift shops and had to do it all manually!