Sky Princess is one of Princess Cruises’ Medallion Class ships. Every passenger receives a “Medallion”. This is a replacement for the ubiquitous cruise card that we are all used to. Crew on the ship can detect who you are without asking and even find passengers on a crowded deck to deliver drinks or food.
Passengers are expected to have downloaded a Princess Cruise app onto their smartphone which is used pre-boarding to enter all the passenger (and other passengers in the group if required) details. Once onboard it is used to access details of the journey, daily events and your bill for example. Buried in the menu are the details of your Internet package – this is what we are examining here.
On our cruise to New England and Canada we all received a 10 day refund of our payments for Internet access as it was expected the satellite coverage would not be very good. I had planned to upgrade with a one-time fee to allow access from all my other devices. But given the reduced Internet on sea days I decided to “share” the one device access across phone, laptop and iPad as required instead.
And I discovered just how easy it was to do!
Note: the screen images were from Sky Princess and are not in any chronological order.
Getting the devices ready
Medallion Net allows guests to swap devices by using a web interface on your chosen device. These are the initial steps to prepare your devices to “pass access” between them.
It is all driven via a URL that connects to the ship’s wi-fi.
mnet.yp.ocean.com
Note: this URL is from Sky Princess. I picked this up from the helpful crew at the Oceanfront booths where passengers are helped with any Medallion issues. It is unlikely to be different on other ships.
On your phone, in your chosen browser (I have an iPhone and chose to use Safari for simplicity) type the above address into a new tab. Do this once and generate an icon on the phone this saves having to type this in every time . The browser should then return something like this.
This shows the phone is the connected device. Now generate an icon on your phone for this ship’s website/URL.
On my phone the icon looked like this on the bottom left.
Now you are ready to to add links to this website on all your other devices. My advice would be to keep it simple and add all the links before swapping which devices are connected.
Now swap the connection
When you created the Medallion Net connections you will have noticed this waiting image.
On your chosen device to be connected next, use your new icon to connect to Medallion Net via the ship’s wi-fi. This will appear on your browser.
Look at the two lozenges and click “Connect this device”. Now be patient.
The bar will slowly turn green and when it is all green you will see “Connected to the Internet” in the middle.
Revert to your phone (original device)
Getting back to your smartphone is now as simple as clicking on the already saved icon and following the above simple process.
Summary
I swapped between an iPhone, an iPad and a laptop for the whole cruise. Sometimes I did forget to revert to my iPhone after using the laptop. This can be easily checked by looking at the front page of the Medallion App top left or clicking on the “connect me” icon.
The only functions I missed by only having one device connected at a time was using my laptop as a WhatsApp keyboard for my iPhone.