A lot of cruise packing lists, blogs and videos recommend packing a night light for your next cruise vacation and for good reason cabins can get dark at night, especially interior cabins. A night light can help prevent you from bumping into things.

What about the lack of outlets?

One problem to consider is… Traditional night lights take up an outlet. Outlets can be a precious commodity in your cruise ship cabin with some cabins having as little as… 1 outlet. This has generally gotten better with newer ships, but can still be an issue. Even newer ships that have more cabin outlets, the outlets can be placed in such a way as to limit their usability. If two outlets are too close together… you can only use one.

Some options…

Pictured: Omeet EU 2-pin Plug – Portable Plug-in 0.7W Travel LED Night Light with USB Wall Charger – 2 Pack of White

• 220v night light. These utilize an often ignored and unused 220v outlet that is present in many cabins.
• USB night lights – These plug into a USB port. That means no outlet taken up. They could go on a laptop, USB wall charger or power bank.
• Rechargeable night light. Since they’re rechargeable they don’t take up an outlet after they’ve been charged.

Rechargeable night lights are particularly helpful when it comes to cabin bathrooms. Very often these have 0 usable outlets…

The problem with cruise ship bathrooms at night

A rechargeable night light is also great for one particular trouble spot in your cabin… your cabin bathroom. Some cabin bathrooms are completely dark. Like… completely dark. Also a lot of times the light switch is on on the outside of the bathroom. To avoid being trapped in a small dark box you need to turn on the light before entering and potentially disturb your cabin mate. Also that much light can have a tendency to wake a person up. Okay, so… plug in a night light? Think again, most cabin bathrooms don’t have an outlet. 

An illustration of the dark cruise ship cabin bathroom

This is a video of me going from my bed into the bathroom with no lights on. There’s not much to the video, except for sound as it’s completely black because the room is so dark. The video was taken on Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas in a Jr Suite.

A picture to illustrate. This is the bathroom on Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas with no lights on.

This is the door to the bathroom. As you can see, the light switch is on the outside of the door. That’s the case with most/all cruise ship cabins we’ve been in. So, let’s say you get up in the middle of the night and stumble your way over to this bathroom door. In order to have any amount of light in the bathroom you need to turn on the switch before entering. That means you’ve flooded your cabin with light and potentially woken someone up. Beyond that, when you get in the bathroom you’ll be in a completely lit room and that can make it more difficult to fall back asleep.

This is a video of me going from my bed into the bathroom with this rechargeable night light on. As you can see… this is a MUCH better experience. The video was taken on Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas in a Jr Suite.

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A photo with the night light on. This is a much better experience all around. No fumbling for the switch, no flooding the cabin with light. Just a small amount of always on light .

Related: Hands on Review: Auvon Rechargeable Night Lights

For lots more about cruise packing including some solutions for the outlet problem check out our complete packing list.

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Cruise Ship Power Solutions – Making Use of the 220 Volt Cabin Outlet On Your Next Cruise

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