I know we’ve had a bunch of threads on tipping but I don’t remember, and couldn’t find, one on room service. It seems pretty common for a gratuity to be added to room service. I stayed in an hotel last week where 15% was added. Then the guy turns up at the door with your food and presents a slip with a space left blank for a tip.
Do you leave an additional tip?
And does anyone out there know whether the deliverer gets a slice of the mandatory 15%? How is the gratuity divided amongst staff for room service? The answer to this might affect my desire to tip the deliverer.
In my experience, it’s more like 18%, and yes, it’s a gratuity, not “hotel taxes.” In general, when I order room service, I pay:
a base price higher than what it would be had I ordered the same thing in the hotel restaurant
a $2-$3 “room service fee”
an 18% gratuity
and there’s STILL room on the bill for a tip!
I usually ask whoever delivers it about the tip - I take the slip and look at it, and ask “So is the tip already on there? I don’t want to stiff you.” The deliverer has always nodded and said “Oh yeah, it’s on there.”
Quite sure it was not taxes - you wouldn’t be charged hotel taxes on food anyway. I do expect the room service waiter to get a tip - I want him/her to get one tip, though, so I want to know if some or all of the gratuity already added in goes to the room service waiter.
I’ve only ordered room service once, for the sick delicious indulgence of it. And I tipped the guy on top of whatever the total was, in cash.
But I haven’t done it since, simply because my wallet puckers at the thought of paying up to 30%/40% extra for something I could just go down and fetch for myself. There are many things I’m willing to splurge on; room service is not, for whatever reason, one of them.
Generally, the gratuity goes directly to the room service servers pocket.
Unless a room service server does an outrageously outstanding job, they do not get more from me that the grat that is automatically added to their check.
We have recently taken off the line for the tip on our room service checks and I believe you will see more of that in the future. A lawsuit filed recently, while dismissed, still made an impact in the industry. The idea of deceptive practices is not one that the hospitality industry wants hanging over its head.
If you really want the details, you can read the article below
During the last five or six years we’ve gotten room service more and more because of the difficulty my wife has getting around. I think the adding of a tip by the hotel in addition to the room service charge is a fairly recent change in hotel policy, as I never used to see it until the last year or so. The first time I saw it on a room service bill my first thought was, “I wonder how many people automatically add a tip without realizing it’s already there?” Which is what I had almost done; only the fact that the total was higher than I had thought it would be made me look at the bill closer. Later I looked more carefully at the room service menu and noticed the fine print at the bottom mentioning that 18% (IIRC) would be added the bill as a tip.
It may be a response to people not tipping room service waiters. I always tipped them 15-20%, and I don’t like the hotel deciding how much I should tip. I know that restaurants have been adding a tip to bills for large parties for years, which I always presumed was at least partly because of the added work of waiting on a large number of people at one time.
On preview, I see Jane D’oh has addressed another point I was going to make: What would happen if you crossed off the line for the tip and either wrote in your own amount or tipped the waiter in cash.
I wonder if the next step is hotels adding housekeeper tips to room bills?
I tip based upon what kind of deal I got on the room. If I’ve paid something close to rack rate: no tip. If I’m enjoying a 4-star room at $60 via a Priceline-type rate, I’ll tip generously.
Why should the amount that you have paid the hotel for your room affect the size of the tip that the server gets? What did he/she do to deserve no tip if you paid rack rate?
Thanks for the link. The court stated that the customer has no right to know where the room service gratuity goes. While I can see that there may not be a right (a much-abused word), it is certainly something I would like to know. The reason for the OP is that I don’t know where it goes, and that knowledge will have a direct impact on whether I want to leave an additional tip.
While I hate to say that you should assume the server gets the grat, I will tell you with 100 % certainty, the server is either getting the grat, a portion of the grat or the $ amt tacked on as “room service service fee” (usually about $2.00).
And yawndave really, the amount you pay for a room should not impact the amount you tip, the level of service provided should.