Princess Cruises has launched MedallionNet Max, a new level of faster on-board Wi-Fi service for travelers on its cruise ships. It can deliver hundreds of megabits a second in some cases.
The aim is to meet the growing demands of today’s intensively digitally-connected travelers and continue to expand the market for cruise vacations. And, yep, we’ll probably see a lot more videos from influencers showing us how great a time they’re having on cruise ships. The speeds are available via premium packages.
Since 2018, Princess has led the industry on high-performance, onboard Wi-Fi aggressively adopting service new satellite constellations, including a Wi-Fi access point in every stateroom on every ship and
ensuring that Wi-Fi service access is simple and hassle-free. It launched its Medallion wearables so you could locate your family members on a big cruise ship.
Princess is the only cruise operator that has adopted every source of bandwidth spanning the globally deployed fleet including LEO (Starlink), MEO, GEO satellite constellations as well as 5G terrestrial. The tech is helping to make the ships seem like less of an island, and they’re putting away the bad memories of when the ships were docked because of the pandemic.
As for the post-COVID recovery, Padgett said, “It’s really been remarkable. We have great demand. We have great demand. We have great ratings, our guests are happy, and the business is going fabulous. We couldn’t be more happy. COVID was a very tough time. But the industry showed how resilient it was, and it is now really back to where it was before, if not better.”
Cruises used to be desert islands for tech, but the tech has moved fast lately. I’ve been writing about Carnival’s Princess cruise ships since 2017, ever since they started adding mobile games for vacationers and launching the Ocean Medallion wearables and fast Wi-Fi on cruises. I’m old enough to remember when you had to pay $10 or more for 15 minutes of slow internet service on a cruise. I paid when I was desperate for some connectivity.
Back in 2017, John Padgett was chief experience and innovation officer for Carnival, which owns Princess Cruises. Now he is president of Princess Cruises. I liked the story because it was a story about technology created by a non-technology company to help ordinary folks have a better vacation experience. The tech faded into the woodwork while the services took the limelight. During the pandemic, cruise ships were grounded for a while. And so Princess Cruises accelerated the modernization of its fleet, retrofitting them with the satellite antennae to capture the broadband signals.
Princess Cruises (AKA The Love Boat) will now offer two-tiers of Wi-Fi service – MedallionNet Classic and MedallionNet Max. MedallionNet Classic will offer the same service performance, reliability and global coverage that Princess guests enjoy today.
MedallionNet Max will now be the highest-performing service tier with prioritized access to the highest quality and highest performance bandwidth available anywhere in the world which is typically Starlink.
MedallionNet Max will only be available in the brand’s industry-leading bundles – Princess Plus and
Princess Premier. These packages are engineered to give guests the maximum experience with the
maximum value.
A la carte pricing for MedallionNet Classic remains $15 per day for a single-device plan and $40 per day for a multi-device plan. Consistent with the cruise brand’s relentless focus on personalized and hassle-free service, guests will not have to do anything different onboard to access the different services.
The appropriate service level will be assigned based on each guest’s package, as indicated on the Princess app. A single guest network will remain, reduce guest confusion related to network names or any complications being added to the onboard experience.
To preview the new service tier, Princess Cruises will host the first-ever land/sea custom UGC competition, leveraging its own dedicated game – Princess Cruises Nautical Quest.
“Just like we did when we launched MedallionNet Classic almost seven years ago, Princess continues to ensure guests have access to highest performing connectivity available at industry leading value,” said Padgett. “By including MedallionNet Max in our incredible bundles we are guaranteeing the best possible onboard experience with the best value anywhere in the world as our guests explore over 330 destinations via our world-class globally deployed fleet.”
Meanwhile, branded game maker Moonrock is working with Princess Cruises on a first-ever Minecraft user-generated content event with 32 of the top influencers on the platform. Eight of them will be on the Enchanted Princess using the brand-new satellite Internet that’s being announced today. They will play a custom escape room map featuring the ship they’ll be on, said John Gaudiosi, cofounder of Moonrock.
The August 7 match up will feature 32 of the world’s most popular UGC players, with eight of the gamers — Shubble, Krinios, Fruitberries, vGumiho, Sneegsnag, JimmyHere, Smajor, and Hannahxxrose — competing aboard Enchanted Princess in the Caribbean against 24 others who will play from home as millions of fans tune in to watch online.
Padgett is aware of how many Americans play games and how many billions of games there are worldwide, especially among children. Adult gamers are now the majority of the population of gamers, and they are concerned about having enough connectivity wherever they are.
“We’re doing this event to demonstrate to the world that gamers can continue their gaming experiences any place, anytime, anywhere in the world, on any Princess ship, and be confident they can do it, not only from a performance standpoint, but also an affordability standpoint,” Padgett said. “Our objective here is to show the gaming community that Princess is a great platform for both their gaming and entertainment.”
“We’re really focused on rejuvenating it with experiences like this Minecraft event,” he said. “Demand for premium-level experiences continues to increase in the world. This is a premium brand, but it is also a big market. That’s where we’re playing, and that’s why we embrace the hundreds of millions of Americans that play games and welcome them on our ship.”
With eight of the 32 Minecraft competitors coming aboard, the Minecraft UGC event is sure to generate a lot of videos that will be viewed by the followers of the influencers, and that will help Princess Cruises.
“It introduces the concept of a cruise vacation to people who absolutely would likely have never considered cruising as a vacation option,” Padgett said.
Padgett said that native gamers would likely rate cruises pretty low as a vacation experience because they would be concerned about connectivity.
In early 2018, Princess established a new standard of connectivity for guests on its cruise ships by beating the bandwidth-at-sea world record with the initial launch of its MedallionNet connectivity service aboard Regal Princess. At a time when the industry average was 10 megabits a second to 20 Mbps per ship, Regal
Princess reached 2.25 Gbps, demonstrating there were no practical limits to progressing shipboard connectivity.
Since that time, the connectivity landscape has changed dramatically with Starlink, with onboard Wi-Fi increasingly becoming a commodity. However, Princess will continue to ensure connectivity experience differentiation by making it the best value and most hassle-free experience possible. The ships all have big domes like golf balls on a tee on top of their decks now; those are the satellite receivers. Starlink satellite’s, however, don’t need quite as much infrastructure.
While MedallionNet Max will only be available within the inclusive Princess Plus and Princess Premier bundles, guests opting to sail with the standard Princess vacation package still will be able to purchase
MedallionNet Classic connectivity with no change to pricing.
In addition to premium connectivity, guests opting for the inclusive Princess Plus and Princess Premier will also enjoy popular amenities like beverages, casual dining, desserts, complimentary room service, fitness classes, crew gratuities and more at an even greater savings of up 65% than when the inclusive package amenities are purchased separately.
“It’s amazing how far things come,” Padgett said. “Everything we shared with you is still around. A lot of good companies label something innovative, but they don’t stick around. Unlike most, our Medallion Class stuck around.”
With the MedallionNet Max, for the first time, the cruise line is introducing a higher level of connectivity from a guaranteed performance standpoint, which the gamers will most appreciate, Padgett said. Yet it’s both affordable and reliable.
In the president’s role, Padgett said he has enjoyed moving Princess from really one of the most iconic brands in the world, with its history as the Love Boat, into modern, contemporary pop culture where the brand was born.
Princess Cruises took time to retrofit each ship in its fleet. Before the pandemic, there were four or five ships ready with the broadband tech. Post pandemic, the company had 15 ships with Medallion Class service, Padgett said. The Sun Princess, the biggest ship ever built in Italy, has even more experiential content built into the ship thanks to the technology.
“Connectivity is, obviously, fundamental on land or sea, and from a Princess standpoint, we continue to be a leader in that space,” Padgett said.
The company has added Starlink low-earth orbit (LEO) broadband service, and now every ship in the fleet leverages it.
“It’s impressive. It brings essentially no latency. It brings global footprint, and it brings actually more affordable capacity. So it’s truly a trifecta from a connectivity standpoint,” Padgett said.
But no satellite connection is flawless, so the company has multiple broadband technologies running at the same time, includig Leo, Geo and 5G services as the sources for the bandwidth on the ships. At any given time, the highest-quality solution is used on the ships.
“It’s accessed by our ship infrastructure, all invisible to the guests themselves,” Padgett said. “They’re just getting great connectivity at a very affordable price so they would never know the difference of what particular bandwidth they’re using.”
There are hiccups like the Crowdstrike global outage, so the company stays diversified to make sure that its broadband sources are also coming from different providers.
But the baseline is pretty good now. Gigabits of data can come into a ship, and then it is sliced and diced up among the passengers.
Princess has a Wi-Fi access point in every stateroom, and it has 100% coverage in every public area on a ship. The access is pretty universal.
The data rates are dynamic and vary throughout the ship based on the type of connection. But Padgett said, “You’re talking about hundreds of megabits a second.”
“We were able to finish our fleet at an expedited pace, changing out the compute infrastructure, the network infrastructure, all the antennae, embedding all the sensors and staging all our experiences, and we were able to do that very efficiently during the pause in service,” Padgett said. “So we came back stronger than ever before.”
There are 16 ships in the fleet now, with the Star Princess arriving in the fall of 2025 as the 17th ship. Princess Cruises has about 35,000 people working for it.
The cruise ship customers are more engaged. The demographic is skewing young, and the ships fit in with the mobile lifestyle that these people have, Padgett said.
“We are seeing a lot of the benefits,” he said. “Our ratings for your experience are higher than ever before.”
The Minecraft event is an example of how the ships now have “amazing platforms to stage experiences,” said Padgett. They have advantages in fun, food and entertainment.
“But what’s unique is, since we control the whole ship, we can stage unique experiences in a high-quality way. What I think is some of the pedestrians in the world as an example. Right now we have the 1900s Porsche enthusiasts on the Majestic Princess sale in Alaska. And so what do the Porsche enthusiasts love? What’s unique to them is we can stage what a Porsche owner loves talking about. It makes us a very amenable platform for whatever special interest group wants to sail. We would love to have many more events like the Minecraft one.”