,daily automatic tips

[psawka]

What do you do if you do NOT want the automatic daily gratuity fee added to your bill and prefer to reward individuals when you leave the cruise?

 

[valleyvillage]

Welcome to Cruise Critic and thanks for your first post. It is sure to be quite active!

[RaiderDuck]

You can go to Guest Services and fill out a form.

 

Something to think of, though: If you do that, how are you going to reward the chef who cooks your food, or the people who wash your towels, or the performers on stage, or the hundreds of others you will never personally meet and have the opportunity to tip?

 

Keeping the daily gratuities on your bill make sure everyone gets paid.

[Love my butler]

48 minutes ago, psawka said:

What do you do if you do NOT want the automatic daily gratuity fee added to your bill and prefer to reward individuals when you leave the cruise?

 

Very simple.  On the last night of your cruise, go to the service desk and ask for the Discretionary Service Charge to be reduced/removed.  They will have you sign a form.  You DO NOT have to indicate a reason for your discretionary adjustment.  The reason to wait until the last night is you cannot reduce/remove a Discretionary Service Charge until after it has already been posted to your account.

[Love my butler]

47 minutes ago, RaiderDuck said:

You can go to Guest Services and fill out a form.

 

Something to think of, though: If you do that, how are you going to reward the chef who cooks your food, or the people who wash your towels, or the performers on stage, or the hundreds of others you will never personally meet and have the opportunity to tip?

 

Keeping the daily gratuities on your bill make sure everyone gets paid.

Something else to think of, I reward people for personal service.  That is the point of a tip.  Trying to conflate tips with every single person working on the ship is ridiculous.  Your money, your choice.  My money, my choice.  NCL allows that distinction, which is awesome.

[kfnesq]

Hang on, I need to go make some popcorn.....

[BirdTravels]

1 hour ago, psawka said:

What do you do if you do NOT want the automatic daily gratuity fee added to your bill and prefer to reward individuals when you leave the cruise?

The Daily Service Charge supports a large number of crew members that you directly interact with and those behind the scenes workers who work 7-days a week, 10-12 hours a day to ensure that you have wonderful cruise. By not paying your DSC, you directly impact those crew members. When that waiter service you a plate of food, there are assistant waiters, bus boys, kitchen staff, cleaning staff who all worked equally hard to make sure you enjoyed your meal. Don't cheat them out of being compensated to save a buck. In the past, you had to wait until your cruise was completed, then file a claim with post-cruise customer service to remove the charges due to substandard performance. I thought that they did away with the forms at guest services. Pay your daily service charges. Stop trying to save a buck. 

[Outerdog]

Why the user base of this forum continues to tolerate (and feed) this sort of thing will forever remain a mystery. How many times must you respond to "yet another tipping thread"?

 

In before 345 posts.

[MotownVoice]

24 minutes ago, BirdTravels said:

Don't cheat them out of being compensated to save a buck.

 

This is the exact point at which we go from reasonable, gracious tipping for a job well done ... to an insane, closed system wherein you must feel guilty, responsible for a cruiseline’s cheap labor practices, and self loathing that you’re having lobster in a cream reduction while your steward may be going home to boiled fish and reeds.

 

It is not your responsibility to make sure cruise staff make a living wage.  That burden falls upon the employers.   Your responsibility is to fulfill whatever agreement you have with the cruise line when you purchase your ticket.   If you find a loophole that you can exploit to avoid paying money, that is your prerogative.  Don’t let anyone sucker you into that “how can you do this to them” line of garbage.

 

It is honorable to tip well.  

 

It is smart to unionize, or otherwise do what you can to force an employer to respect the living condition that a full time wage under their employ provides.

 

Just like it is for every single other one of us.

[ziggyuk]

30 minutes ago, BirdTravels said:

Don't cheat them out of being compensated to save a buck.

 

Pay your daily service charges. Stop trying to save a buck. 

 

At no point did the OP say they wanted to reduce the amount they pay, they simply said they wanted to distribute it themselves and asked it that was possible.

 

It's a personal choice, my personal choice is to pay the DSC and not a cent more, if the OP would rather do their own thing that's their choice.

[smplybcause]

Even if you forget about the fact that the DSC covers employees you can't see - with freestyle it's just a pain in the butt. You'd need to bring cash with you for every meal you eat (which the exception for specialty dining which includes gratuity). Too much cash to remember to carry around for me. 

[cottagers2000]

2 hours ago, Love my butler said:

Very simple.  On the last night of your cruise, go to the service desk and ask for the Discretionary Service Charge to be reduced/removed.  They will have you sign a form.  You DO NOT have to indicate a reason for your discretionary adjustment.  The reason to wait until the last night is you cannot reduce/remove a Discretionary Service Charge until after it has already been posted to your account.

Not quite correct regarding the last night. Last month I was on the Epic after boarding at Civitavecchia on a Wednesday, and on enquiring with guest services about the Service Charge Adjustment form, I was asked to return on the following Monday, after the passengers at Barcelona had boarded. The $105 was immediately credited to my account even before the last days DSC of $15 had been added to my account. The form does actually ask you to fill in the details for your request to have the discretionary service charge removed, but I simply signed it, asked for a copy which was so simple to arrange.  

[Ptroxx]

So many people involved in your daily enjoyment on the ship. From the start of your day to you go to bed every night.    And 15.00 a day is a small price to pay.   And sure if you don’t want to pay more than that that’s your prerogative.    But for this American I like to bring extra tip money for an above and beyond job. 

I count about 18 different people involved in my day to day.  

 

 

Bring you continental breakfast to your room(coffee,cereal,juice)

Someone got the breakfast ready to send to your room 

Cleans up you dirty dishes from that breakfast 

Actual real hot breakfast cook at Resturant 

Server

Bus person

Dishwasher

Lunch cook 

Server 

Bus person

Dishwasher

Bartender drinks 

Cabin cleaner everyday 

Laundry person for your clean sheets and towels every day 

Dinner cooks 

Server 

Bus person 

Dishwasher

pastry chef

 

 

[cottagers2000]

Ptroxx, I won't quote your post as the type is rather large and I have seen American dollars before, but I do believe all the employees as you showed do actually get paid, and I for one am certainly not going to supplement their income by giving them more. The fact that I can choose to pay the daily service charge or not is purely my own choice

[Ptroxx]

Not sure why the type got so big.      

 

So who would you tip?  And how much?    

Supplement their income Lolol.  You have no idea about the service industry.   

 

When you go to a resturant do you tip your server?   Well that server takes part of that tip and splits it with the other people that help him succeed.   The bus person , dishwasher, sometimes the cook.    Depending on the establishment.    

 

So you do you.  And I’ll go my route. 🇺🇸

[cottagers2000]

 

So who would you tip?  And how much?    On a cruise, nobody

Supplement their income Lolol.  You have no idea about the service industry.  Wrong. I used to work behind a bar at a restaurant  in Guernsey

 

When you go to a resturant do you tip your server?  If the bill was say $8.90 or £8.80 or €8.85, I would probably leave a tenner. Well that server takes part of that tip and splits it with the other people that help him succeed.  They all get paid I believe. The bus person , dishwasher, sometimes the cook. Never heard of a bus person except on a bus

Edited August 21, 2019 by cottagers2000

[Ptroxx]

2 minutes ago, cottagers2000 said:

 

So who would you tip?  And how much?    On a cruise, nobody

Supplement their income Lolol.  You have no idea about the service industry.  Wrong. I used to work behind a bar at a restaurant  

 

When you go to a resturant do you tip your server?  If the bill was say $8.90 or £8.80 or €8.85, I would probably leave a tenner. Well that server takes part of that tip and splits it with the other people that help him succeed.  They all get paid I believe. The bus person , dishwasher, sometimes the cook. Never heard of a bus person except on a bus

Like I said you don’t understand the service industry.    

But you like to debate this subject.    

So I’ll bow out and say the uk has won again.   Lol.     

 

 

 

[cottagers2000]

2 minutes ago, Ptroxx said:

Like I said you don’t understand the service industry.    

But you like to debate this subject.    

So I’ll bow out and say the uk has won again.   Lol.     

 

 

 

No debate. It was you who said I had no idea about the service industry when I advised you differently

[KeithJenner]

I really don’t care what people do, and we all know that this thread has just been started for the entertainment of whoever it was that created an account to make the opening post, but I will say this:

 

Pay the DSC, don’t pay the DSC, do what you want but don’t let it ruin your whole cruise.

 

Having just come back from a great cruise, we met some people who wasted so much of their time getting upset about the DSC, queueing up at guest services to ask questions about it and finally to get it removed. It was hanging over them for the whole 15 days.

 

Personally, that’s why I like it. I prepay it and don’t have to worry about it at all during the cruise. If people want to remove it then that’s fine. Some people just seem to want to worry so much about a few pound that they end up ruining what they paid thousands for.

[Birdie And Sue]

2 hours ago, MotownVoice said:

 

This is the exact point at which we go from reasonable, gracious tipping for a job well done ... to an insane, closed system wherein you must feel guilty, responsible for a cruiseline’s cheap labor practices, and self loathing that you’re having lobster in a cream reduction while your steward may be going home to boiled fish and reeds.

 

It is not your responsibility to make sure cruise staff make a living wage.  That burden falls upon the employers.   Your responsibility is to fulfill whatever agreement you have with the cruise line when you purchase your ticket.   If you find a loophole that you can exploit to avoid paying money, that is your prerogative.  Don’t let anyone sucker you into that “how can you do this to them” line of garbage.

 

It is honorable to tip well.  

 

It is smart to unionize, or otherwise do what you can to force an employer to respect the living condition that a full time wage under their employ provides.

 

Just like it is for every single other one of us.

 

No one MUST feel any particular way.  people feel how they choose to feel, the choice is usually made to make them self feel justified for being cheap.  Such silliness over something that is 100% an accounting issue.

[Sam Ting]

4 hours ago, RaiderDuck said:

You can go to Guest Services and fill out a form.

 

Something to think of, though: If you do that, how are you going to reward the chef who cooks your food, or the people who wash your towels, or the performers on stage, or the hundreds of others you will never personally meet and have the opportunity to tip?

 

Keeping the daily gratuities on your bill make sure everyone gets paid.

 

Actually they are cooking the food that is included in your fare.  They are washing the cruise lines towels that are provided to the guests like any other hotel, not your towels, and the performers on stage are hired by the cruise line to persuade people to travel with them.  Why anyone would think these costs should be borne by the passengers as a donation is beyond me.

[K_e_short]

3 hours ago, Outerdog said:

Why the user base of this forum continues to tolerate (and feed) this sort of thing will forever remain a mystery. How many times must you respond to "yet another tipping thread"?

 

In before 345 posts.

 

Because people are way too lazy to actually go online and search for information.

We've gone from the lazy "google it" behaviout to "I'll just ask the question in a message board" which is even worse.

 

At least when people googled things the most accurate answer would show up first.

 

This site is just full of people's opinions and experiences (which are not necessarily the most accurate answer).

 

 

[Sam Ting]

3 hours ago, BirdTravels said:

The Daily Service Charge supports a large number of crew members that you directly interact with and those behind the scenes workers who work 7-days a week, 10-12 hours a day to ensure that you have wonderful cruise. By not paying your DSC, you directly impact those crew members. When that waiter service you a plate of food, there are assistant waiters, bus boys, kitchen staff, cleaning staff who all worked equally hard to make sure you enjoyed your meal. Don't cheat them out of being compensated to save a buck. In the past, you had to wait until your cruise was completed, then file a claim with post-cruise customer service to remove the charges due to substandard performance. I thought that they did away with the forms at guest services. Pay your daily service charges. Stop trying to save a buck. 

/

What about the captain?  Didn’t he have anything to do to ensure you had a wonderful cruise?  What about the Cruise director?  How about the sales people in the jewelry store?  The art auctioneers?  Who are these behind the scenes people?  The executives work very hard to make your cruise wonderful, too you know.

 

 

Just where do you draw the line?  We remove the service charge and draw it just above the people who serve us directly.  

 

We will not subsidize a billion dollar company so they can pay salaries to the employees who are hired to maintain their ships or property.  

 

Have a great cruise!

[Ptroxx]

21 minutes ago, cottagers2000 said:

No debate. It was you who said I had no idea about the service industry when I advised you differently

Just because you worked behind a bar at a resturant doesn’t mean you understand the service industry.    

Cause you really do not have any idea about the industry.     

[psawka]

All the people in "the background" do a lot of work and should be paid an honest wage by their employer....the ones that directly benefit me are the wait staff and the housekeeper.  Any other thing that is done for me I would tip at the time.  as for the amount, it is not unreasonable...as a matter of fact, when I leave the ship the amount of tips to the wait staff and house keepers usually is greater than the daily charge, but has been well earned by these individuals.  All others are the responsibility of the employer, not the passengers.  We don't leave a tip for every employee of a motel when we stay there....as a matter of fact many people do not even tip the house keepers (my daughter and grand daughter have held these jobs and got nothing) and certainly should not be expected to trip all the other staff members that are involved in maked the motel work.  It is an individual decision to make...my original question was to find out what I could about NCL .not to start a battle with anyone, nor was it posted for my entertianment.