How much of a tip should I leave for housekeeping each day in a nice, but not amazing (Marriott in Boise Idaho) hotel. I haven’t the vaguest of the daily charge for the room, because this is a business trip. TO make it even more difficult, it’s a company paid business trip for the purpose of having 3 meetings halfway through a relocation.
Did that make sense? Hubby & I are moving because of his job, his company is paying for most of it, Hubby has to spend a week, at company expense, in the city that is home to corporate headquarters, so the company is footing the bill for our inconvenience.
Business travel is not new to me. A decent, non-resort hotel is. In the past, I have gone with $1 per room occupant per day plus another buck for getting me another pillow in very basic accommodations (the Motel 6 in Lizardville, TX) and $5 per occupant per day in super fancy resort-type accommodations ($12 mini fridge candy bars, bellmen, etc) in expensive (Manhatten, La Jolla, Vegas, etc) locations.
I am aware that tipping at the end of the stay is acceptable, but I prefer to tip daily, as the personnel can change, and I am all in favor of making nice-nice in advance just in case I need that extra pillow or something.
So what should I tip for “nice” in the middle of nowhere?
Ah, but housekeepers at the fancy places usually actually clean up that mess! The, uhm, lower end destinations tend to not change sheets & towels for the same customer, unless requested, sometimes not even then, not vacuum regularly and use lysol rather than clean the bathroom.
I left $10 this morning. 2 people, 2 cats, clean room.
I don’t stay in hotels that regularly, but when i do (even if it’s a “fancy” place) i always tick the little box saying that i don’t need my sheets or towels changed every day.
All of my hotel stays over the past few years have been 2-3 nights, and i just can’t fathom needing new sheets and towels for every day of such a short stay. It’s always struck me as being wasteful just because you can.
5-7 on average, sheets aren’t that big of a deal, depending on the relative humidity and whether the A/C works, but I want 2 freaking towels (long hair & fat ass) and I want more than one clean washcloth per week. It may or may not be the housekeepers fault, but even in backwoods BFE with one shitty motel in town, if I don’t get clean linens on request, management, my boss, & sometimes the client get a verbal comment and a letter, and the housekeeping staff get a shitty tip. It’s not so much the price of the accommodations as the level of service.
Which was my point – I have stayed in not-quite sleazy dive motels, and I have stayed in top of the line hotels. Until now, I have never stayed in a merely “nice” hotel. I was asking for experiences and expectations in middle of the road, normal, regular transactions. My apologies if I was unclear in my explanation of the situation and the question involved.
I used to work for a soul-sucking software company that required travel on a regular basis. On those trips I regularly stayed at hotels like the Marriott you are in and left $5 per day for housekeeping.
I also think it is pretty standard for many nicer hotel chains to not change bedding unless the guest requests it, so that never figured into the equation for me.
In about the same level of hotel you’ll be in, I normally tip $2 per day. Hmmm…reading some of these responses, perhaps I’m being too cheap. But hotel maids, unlike waiters, do get paid a wage. So I don’t feel the need to be overly generouse.
I leave $1-2 a day. And thanks to a Doper’s advice, I leave it each day instead of at the end of the stay, since the team might be different each day.
On the seven-day cruise I just went on, I left $20 for the week since I knew it was the same group. And it was a little more than average because they did those fun towel animals.
