Getting Started with Shipmate and Creating Your Cruise Profile

Shipmate Account & Profile Update

First off, you’ll need to have our Shipmate Cruise App downloaded to your device. If you haven’t yet done that, you can download both by clicking here.

All set?  Great, let’s move on!

Before we do, I just wanna say “Welcome to our Shipmate Community!” We’re a small team of people that love cruising and love our jobs building this cruise community. If you’d like to see how we started, you can check out our founding story here. Otherwise, let’s move on!

Feel free to follow along in the video below, or with the instructions later in the post… whichever you’d prefer!

Getting Started with Shipmate Video

Once you’ve opened the app, your main navigation will be at the bottom of your screen. There, you’ll find a tab bar with these options.

News Feed

Or more appropriately, your “Cruise Feed.” In this section, you’ll find two tabs:  My Feed and your General Feed. The General Feed shows all of the latest content from other users. This includes Images, Reviews, Chat Comments, and more. In your My Feed area, you’ll find only the latest info that’s relevant to your ship and sailing. If you have an upcoming Bermuda cruise on the NCL Breakaway, for example, you’ll only see reviews, chat, and pictures of the NCL Breakaway and of Bermuda.

My Cruises

Here, you’ll store all of your cruise history. Again, you’ll find two sections in this tab:  Next Cruise and All Cruises. Once you save cruises, your upcoming sailing detail (ship, ports, etc) will be located in the “Next Cruise” tab. In the All Cruises tab, you’ll find a list of every cruise saved to your profile. It’s like your “cruise diary.”

Explore

We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for you to access info on any ship and port. You’ll find all of that here in the “Explore” tab. This section is made up of multiple parts, including the following.

• Ships: Use this to find info on any ship. For every vessel you’ll be able to access Deck Maps, Reviews, Current Location, Ship Venues, and more.
• Ports:  Here you can read our Port Reviews and see all of our user uploaded images for that cruise destination.
• Excursions:  We work with two of the most esteemed cruise excursion providers in the industry:  Shore Excursions Group and Resort for a Day. We encourage you to check out their available options. They offer all of the same guarantees as do the cruise lines, and often at a great discount. We’ve had over 6,000 bookings through the app without any ship-missing-incidents!
• Cruise Deck Cams: Can’t wait to get onboard to see what’s happening? Check out live webcams from your ship or others.
• Ship Tracking: Dude… where’s my ship? Find your vessel’s current location at any point using our ship tracking feature.

Note: All of the info accessed through the Explore section can also be found in your Saved Cruises. This section is used mostly to explore other ships and ports outside of your own itinerary.

Now that we’ve looked at the “Explore” tab, let’s move onto the next one.

User Gallery

This is a section that you can return to daily… or hourly. We receive hundreds of new, user cruise photos every day. And, we have some amazing photographers out there! With each photo, you’ll find a title and tags leading to the ship or port included in that photo. You can upload your own best cruise photos here.

Profile

All of your own stuff can be accessed here. If you’ve uploaded any Reviews or Photos, here’s where you’ll find them. This is also where you can find your list of ship mate buddies and any direct messages from other users. Here’s a quick description of each.

• Ship Mates:  When looking at any other user’s profile, you’ll see the option to add that user as your “ship mate.” If he or she accepts, that user will then show up in your list of ship mates. This section makes it very easy to find all of your favorite ship mates!
• Messages: These are private messages not seen by other users. You can message any other user from that user’s profile. There, you’ll find a “message” option under their user image. You can also send images within private messages!

Within this section, you can also edit your user profile. You’ll be able to change your user image, displayed hometown, and more. Just click the “edit” button under your profile image.

If you’re experiencing any issues with the app, or if you have feedback for us, you can Contact Us from the Profile section of Shipmate. You’ll see that by scrolling down to the bottom of this view. We read every one of your emails and do our best to respond within 24 hours.

That makes up our main navigation menu at the bottom of your Shipmate App. Now that we’re done with the general overview, let’s start doing stuff!

Next Step: Creating Your User Cruise Profile

Your User Cruise Profile is where all of your past and future cruises are saved. It’s also where you add a few pieces to show others in the cruise community who you are.

Why do you need an account to use Shipmate?

You don’t really have to have a user account. If you’d like to come and surf around without a profile, feel free. You’ll have full access to all of our Ship info, Port content, and plenty more. If you’d like to contribute to the community, you’ll need a profile. This is to help us weed out the dirty, pirate users and to maintain a wholesome forum. Also, to store any cruise history, we need something to attach that to (a user profile).

Convinced? Ok, let’s go.

If you’d like, you can follow along with the video at the top of this post to set up your Shipmate User Account and to edit your profile.

Now that you have a username and password, the next thing you’ll want to do is to pretty-up your profile. You’ll be able to edit the following:

Email Address:  this is what you’ll use to recover your username and/or password if you ever forget it. We’ll also use this to contact you with important updates, like when you’re contacted by another Shipmate, etc. We’ll never abuse or sell your trust in us by adding this!

Username:  you’ll use this to log into your account. This username is visible to other ship mates, so we recommend something other than your email address. Think of something fun!

Home Town:  this field lets you include whatever you’d like… whether that’s your country, state, city, neighborhood, or whatever stomping grounds you’d like to claim as your own.

Image:  we want to see that pretty face of yours. Swap out our boring logo with that smiling, cruise-ready mug of yours.

Once done, don’t forget to hit the “Save” button.

Next step: Adding a Cruise to your Profile!