For many Americans, the line between work and home has blurred.
As more people have work-from-home or hybrid office situations, when you're working and when you're off has become a little confusing for some people.
That has its positive aspects. Many workers have more flexibility when traveling because they can do their jobs from wherever they are. The negative is that the line between days off and workdays has also been blurred.
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For some people, that's a fair trade-off.
You can travel, but you still have to check email and Slack and do a little work here and there. For others, this changing reality means they can have real workdays from places other than the home or office.
That's something you see more on cruise ships. Travel agents and travel media/influencers have always worked from cruise ships, but now you see more people in the cafeteria and various quiet places on board trying to work.
Now that most cruise lines offer Starlink Internet, working on ships is possible, but it's certainly not perfect. Signals drop, Zoom and other video conferencing becomes challenging, especially on calls with more than a few participants, and connections just aren't always clear.
Some passengers have tried to use technology, including travel routers, to improve their connection (and sometimes to game the system).
Royal Caribbean recently banned such devices and began confiscating them.
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Image source: Royal Caribbean.
Royal Caribbean bans travel routers
Royal Caribbean charges for the Internet. You pay per connection, and while you can move your paid connection between devices, passengers who want to use their computer and a phone or tablet at the same time are frustrated.
If you need more than one device connected at the same time, you are supposed to purchase a second connection.
Some passengers use a travel router to bypass the cruise line's security systems, which prevent phones or laptops from sharing a connection.
It was always against the rules to use a travel router (or any other device) for that purpose, but Royal Caribbean had no way of knowing what was happening.
Now, the cruise line has added routers to its list of prohibited items. This is how the ban appears on the cruise line's website:
- Cybersecurity and deliberate electronic crimes:
- Satellite dishes, routers and other network equipment
In reality, the wording leaves room for the cruise line to confiscate devices it hasn't named (and those that may not yet exist).
Royal Caribbean enforces the ban
Multiple social media groups are dedicated to working from cruise ships and/or working remotely. There are several posts on these forums about using travel routers on cruise ships.
Not all posts are about breaking the rules. Many of them explain how people can use a VPN to hide their location or log into various work systems. (These might violate workplace rules, but that's not the cruise line's problem.)
Members of some of those groups have reported that in recent days Royal Caribbean has begun confiscating travel routers. This hasn't been uniform across all cruise ships, but it has been happening everywhere.
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Travel routers, of course, are small and are not always discovered in a luggage scan. That means some people will get away with it, and room managers are generally not known to act as secondary enforcers of these bans.
Still, the rules are being widely enforced and people who shouldn't be on a cruise ship while at work can't count on using a travel router to hide their location.
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