tips for butler

I will be staying in a suite on Britannia. I don't plan to use the butler much, perhaps breakfast in suite for 2 days, already booked my excursions and specialty restaurants online. But still I would like to give gratuity to the butler. Will £50 for 7 nights be enough?

I will be staying in a suite on Britannia. I don't plan to use the butler much, perhaps breakfast in suite for 2 days, already booked my excursions and specialty restaurants online. But still I would like to give gratuity to the butler. Will £50 for 7 nights be enough?

If you don’t remove the automatic service charge of £7 per person per night then you don’t need to feel obliged to tip them anything, as they receive a percentage of that fund.

If you remove the charge then you should tip based upon how good / useful they are. We have had 4 or 5 Butlers. One was quite good, one was appalling and the others were mediocre. None did very much at all that was useful to us and we found their regular visits pretending to do things of use to be quite intrusive.

We tend to tip the butler around one fifth of the amount that we tip the cabin steward and often we feel that we have been over generous! If you get a level of service from them that warrants as much as a £50 tip then you will have done much better than us.

£10 per day is a good rule of thumb for us and for par excellent service, even more.

Bal

If you are paying auto service charge then I believe £20 would be fair. If you make a lot of demands or they go out of their way to really enhance your cruise experience then I would pay more in appreciation.

I would not pay a tip for butlers who are just annoying and intrusive. I would also not pay if they fail to fulfil simple requests like lemon and ice in cabin.

IMO the auto service charge covers any obligations so you shouldn't feel obliged to pay anything.

We have always left the auto tip on and then how much extra we have given the butler depends on how much he's done for us. For example if there is an option to have breakfast in The Epicurean as a suite passenger then we would certainly do that. It may be that on a port day, if we have an excursion then we may ask the butler to serve breakfast in the cabin as early as possible. We have often had lunch in the cabin, sometimes a mixture of things from room service and some from the main restaurant lunch menu.

We would always tip extra if we've had a drinks do in our cabin. Sometimes we've had a pre-dinner drinks do with the other members of our table and the butler has arranged all that, served the drinks, arranged for extra canapes and then cleared it all away afterwards. We would certainly tip extra for that.

We have always found the butlers extremely helpful and keen to make our cruise as good as possible. We've never had one that's intrusive. As I say how much extra we tip depends on how much they do for us.

We've never encountered a butler being intrusive either. They have a job to do and they do their very best to be helpful. We've not made much use of them but they're useful whenyou need them.

They also serve who only stand and wait. Our first Butler on our first P&O cruise, after 50+ cruises. Difficult to adjust to although enjoying the daily delivery of fresh fruit and canapès . He obviously wanted so much to assist and be of service but if one is not born to it, so to speak, it was a little disconcerting. As a situation of service available rather than service rendered and while leaving our prepaid gratuities on account, we tipped him the mount we customarily give housekeepers, £2/day

On our cruise in March reception said the butler was not included in the auto tips

On our cruise in March reception said the butler was not included in the auto tips

The P&O website says that it does :

"This helps reward the waiters and buffet staff as well as your cabin steward or butler, who greatly appreciate your recognition of their hard work. "

If there are doubts then I would be inclined to remove the service charge and pay directly.

On our cruise in March reception said the butler was not included in the auto tips

That’s incorrect. They are definitely included.