I am sailing on a cruise soon and would like to hear your recommendation for which VPN service you have used, and that has worked well to bypass all the restrictions.
I have used NordVPN in the past and it didn’t work on some of the cruise lines. In fact the cruise lines are now very smart to block popular VPNs.
PS. I am sailing on the Queen Mary 2 ocean liner.
What restrictions will a VPN bypass? If you have a non streaming package a VPN won’t do anything to increase the bandwidth.
I use PIA and never had an issue. That said dont forget VPNs create overhead so when needed I drop off. Latency on a cruise ship is HUGE even w/ satellite. Everyone always talks about “bandwidth” which is fine, but latency is a huge issue, jitter etc… are all things to think about. Anyhow technicals aside, I use PIA been happy w/ it.
IT dude here and avid cruiser, Not sure why but find I’m better of Not Using a VPN on a ship especially Virgin. Otherwise I like Speedify, my .02 worth
Just got off a cruise, bought lowest tier, connected to wifi then connected to free 1.1.1.1 VPN, let me do everything the higher tiers could do. Speed was still ~30 up/30 down. I did however have to deactivate to access the ship’s onboard app so keep that in mind. Can’t use it while you’re waiting on a dinner reservation etc.
I’ve used Nord exclusively when cruising and have had no issues 
The only problem with a vpn is that it could in theory increase the amount of data that you are sending and receiving which could be problematic when your usage is capped I’m not entirely sure if what I’m saying is correct only that it made sense when I typed it
Any VPN will be just as good as another - but they’re gonna slow you way down, and considering how slow ship internet already is, I don’t see it as worth it.
If the ship uses an app for things like booking your dinner reservations, viewing the day’s event schedule, and ordering food and drinks, such as the Princess app, activating VPN will make the app useless, including Apple’s Private Relay. In my case, turning on VPN or Private Relay didn’t have any improvements when surfing the web, social media apps, etc.
It depends on the cruise line a lot. On RCCL there is only one tier and they don’t care about vpn’s. NCL on the other hand does aggressive DPI and blocks all VPn’s on the lowest tier package.
You may give us a try 
I have successfuly used Private Internet Aceess on the QM2.
On the last cruise, on the most basic Internet package, it didn’t allow for videos/images to be sent on WhatsApp (just texts), and also youtube was banned. Also, for some reason BBC News podcasts were also blocked. I didn’t want to upgrade to the most expensive package, but figured a VPN could bypass some of these restrictions.
Latency is very bad, yes, but for the majority of use-cases, it’s good enough.
Do you not find that a cruise wifi will block certain services/websites/ports?
One more question about Speedify - their claim to fame is that they will bond multiple connections and speed up your Internet connection? can that be used on a cruise? and if so, how?
Thank you - that’s a great tip ! which cruise company was that?
With most cruise wifi packages, the bandwidth is not limited, so that’s not a concern. The main issue I had with wifi on cruise ships is how slow they are (but I can wait, not an issue), and the fact that a lot of things I wanted to access were blocked on the basic wifi package. My intent was to use a VPN to remove any restrictions or blocks.
A post where every single element (apart from the opinion at the end, which is just misguided not wrong) is wrong. Beautiful stuff.
Maybe on some older ships it would, but the modern systems i’ve seen means a VPN will not help there