Overnight excursion and tipping

im curious. We are taking a cruise to the far east and for almost half of our cruise we will be off the ship on overnight excursions...how do handle tipping for this? the automatic hotel service charge that is added at the end of the cruise? Part of me feels that it is not fair for me to pay a tip to cover days when I'm not even on the ship but I also don't want to be a Scrooge....

It has never crossed my mind to reduce the Hotel Service Charge for the nights I was off the ship.

Now that you have brought it up, I still wouldn't do it.

This is a major part of the salary of the people who share in the pool, and just because I've opted to skip a night (or several nights), I don't want to reduce their income.

I would not be giving out extra tips for those nights, though.

I would also not decrease the hotel service charge for the nights off the ship. The crew depends on the HSC for much of their income. If this is an issue for you with many days off the ship - have you looked into other options such as specific tours (not coming off a ship but all inclusive with flights, etc) to where you are going?

This is not an issue for us I'm just curious what others have done in this situation....we have always honored tips and paid extra cash to our room stewards and regular waiters...

In Dec/16 we did a 28-day SE Asia cruise with HAL. On this cruise we took a couple of overnight trips, including where we left the ship in one port and rejoined it in another port. We had to get prior permission from HAL to do this - as it actually required official disembarking/re-embarking for visa purposes. Even though we paid gratuities for the days we were off the ship, we found out later our cabin attendants would not receive anything for those days we were off the ship.

We also had a similar case this past December with Celebrity. We were off the ship for several nights and when we queried our attendant, he also confirmed he would not be receiving anything for the nights we were off the ship. When I questioned the customer service staff about it - they would neither confirm, nor deny, the situation. We had prepaid our gratuities and when I asked about getting credit for the nights we were away, I was told it was not possible as the pre-payment of gratuities was part of a package deal.

We have done a number of overnight excursions and on those noghts the HSC was not deducted from our account. We did not ask for this, it was just done.

Terri