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 unclear for some people.
That has its positives. Many workers have more flexibility to travel as they can do their jobs from wherever they might be. The negative is that the lines between days off and working days have blurred, too.
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For some people, that's a fair tradeoff.
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 actual work days from places other than home or the office.
That's something you see more of on cruise ships. Travel agents and travel media/influencers have always worked from cruise ships, but now you see more people in the coffee shop and in various quiet places on board trying to get work done.
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 meetings get challenging, especially on calls with more than a few participants, and connections are simply not always clear.
Some passengers have tried to use technology, including travel routers, to improve their connection (and sometimes to cheat the system).
Royal Caribbean recently banned those devices and has begun 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-for connection among 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 buy a second connection.
Some passengers use a travel router to get around 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 it was happening.
Now, the cruise line has added routers to its banned item list. Here's how the ban is listed on the cruise line's webpage:
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Cybersecurity and deliberate electronic crime:
- Satellite dishes, routers, and other networking equipment
The wording actually leaves room for the cruise line to confiscate devices it has not named (and ones that may not exist yet).
Royal Caribbean enforces the ban
Multiple social-media groups are devoted to working from cruise ships and/or working remotely. On these boards are multiple posts about how to use travel routers on cruise ships.
Not all the posts are about breaking the rules. Many of them explain how people can use a VPN to hide their location or to log on to various work systems. (Those might break 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. That has not been uniform across all cruise ships, but it has been happening widely.
Related: Beware this Royal Caribbean cruise scam (don't blame the cruise line)
Travel routers are small, of course, and are not always discovered in a luggage scan. That means some people will get away with bringing theirs on board, and room stewards have generally not been known to act as secondary enforcers of these bans.
Still, the rules are being widely enforced, and people who aren't supposed to be on a cruise ship while on the job can't count on using a travel router to obscure their location.
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