Tips!

Whatever the cruise lines call them, tips, gratuities or service charge, this subject will always spark the most heated discussions amongst their passengers.

On one hand, we get the argument that the cruise fares are high enough without having to supplement the crew’s salaries with tipping whilst on the other hand is the response that these people are working very hard on fairly low pay and deserve to be rewarded.

The biggest cause for discussion seems to be with “automatic gratuities” which are charged per person and added to your on board account at a daily set amount. This is not usually obligatory but sometimes it does appear problematic to remove them and the amounts can add up to fairly large amounts, especially for family cabins. Gratuities on a two week cruise on Royal Caribbean for example can add nearly £620 extra cost for a family of four.

What causes confusion is that there is no standard policy between the companies. Some cruise lines such as Marella and Azamara do include gratuities as part of your fare which does seem the easiest solution. MSC are planning to also include a service charge in fares for UK passengers and hope to have this in place in the next few weeks. Norwegian Cruise Lines changed a couple of years ago to all inclusive drinks and tips fares and have recently amended this. They now offer “Free At Sea” where you can opt to pay an additional fee from £99 per person to include two extra benefits such as drinks and tips. P&O will be scrapping their daily service charge across the fleet from next month as it has been off-putting to new customers.

Generally, we are used to tipping when rewarding good service. Rarely will you receive anything but good service on the ships, but we seem to be loath to pay both in advance and automatically.

What do you think?…