Most people prepare for a cruise the same way they prepare for any trip abroad — add the international day pass and stop thinking about it. That doesn't work at sea. TravelPass covers countries, and a ship in open water isn't one, so the pass you added never activates and the rates you fall through to are the expensive ones.
What Cruise Daily Pass costs
- $20 per line per day — nearly double the $12/day TravelPass rate on land.
- Charged only on days you actually use service onboard, in 24-hour sessions.
- Add it by texting CRUISE to 4004 before or at the start of your cruise.
- Available on select cruise lines only — check yours before you sail rather than after.
What's included
- Unlimited data, but only 0.5GB of it at high speed. After that it's 3G for the rest of the 24-hour session.
- Unlimited calls to the US, incoming and outgoing.
- Unlimited texts.
- Calls to countries other than the US are billed as if you'd made them from home — the pass doesn't change that.
0.5GB is the real limitation
Half a gigabyte is a tenth of what TravelPass gives you on land, and it goes quickly on a device that syncs photos or backs up automatically. Once it's gone you keep unlimited data at 3G for the rest of the session. Verizon will text an offer for another 0.5GB of high speed for $10, and you can buy that more than once in the same 24-hour session — so a heavy day at sea can cost well past $20.
What happens if you don't add it
You fall through to Pay As You Go: $1.99 a minute for calls, $0.50 per text sent, $0.05 per text received. The part people miss is data — Verizon doesn't offer pay-as-you-go data on cruise ships at all. There is no metered fallback and no small accidental charge. It's the pass or no cellular data.
Flying there is a different pass again
In-flight Daily Pass is also $20 per line per day, on participating international flights, and it's data only — unlimited but at 3G speeds throughout. Talk and text aren't included: $1.99 a minute, $0.50 per text sent, $0.05 received. So a fly-and-cruise trip can involve two separate $20 passes on the same day as your TravelPass session on land.
Whether it's worth buying
A seven-day cruise where you use your phone every day is $140 per line. Against that, price the ship's own Wi-Fi package before you sail — most lines sell one, and for data alone it's often the cheaper route, with Cruise Daily Pass making more sense if you specifically need your own number to ring. The two aren't interchangeable, and deciding at sea is how people end up paying for both.
For the port days and everything after you disembark, the country-based pass is $12/day — or $6 in Mexico and Canada, and $0 there on Unlimited plans.
Read the TravelPass guide →
Jean Gilles has researched personal finance, consumer technology, and wireless pricing for over a decade. He founded ShopCellPlans in 2019 and writes every review on the site.
Frequently asked questions
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