Does the automatic gratuity on cruises actually go towards the salary of cruise employees?

10/14/2022 10:59:08 AM

My sister-in-law worked on a cruise ship for years. She said all employees are on contracts and they received no more and no less than their contracted rate. The auto-gratuity is used to pay the base salary of almost all crew and even land based employees. She showed me one of her pay stubs and it showed almost all of her pay was made up in auto-gratuity and the balance is made up by the cruise line. She mentioned there are competitions with $20 bonuses if passengers mentioned her name in a survey. If you want to tip cruise employees you should hand them cash and write their name on a survey. Also, there is no ‘list’ of passengers that remove auto-gratuity, that’s a silly myth. I remove gratuity on my account on every cruise and tip in cash only – they don’t have to report cash tips. Every cent of your auto-gratuity just reduces what the big cruise corporations are contracted to pay their employees.

11/9/2018 4:19:46 PM

Cruise lines are always quick to state that tips to to the employees, by which we assume that if we tip an extra $50 then the employee will get $50 extra. However this undercover investigation appears to show that this is not the case.

The undercover employee is promised $1010 per month (50s mark on the video) and that he would “probably get much more from tips”. Later this is ‘amended’ to $710 per month. (1m30s).

His actual payment (for just over a month) is:

  • $60 basic wage
  • $600 tips
  • $176 to make the amount he was paid up to the contractual minimum the company offered.

To make this clear, all the tips given him by the customers were used not to increase the amount of money the employee received, but to reduce the amount of money the company had to give him.. A generous customer who gave him a $50 tip would simply have reduced the amount of money the company paid, and not increased the amount the employee received. If you had tipped less the employee would not have received any less. (If some generous customer had given him a $200 tip he might have received about $25 more, but you can bet that some form of tip sharing would have negated this possibility.)

TLDR: The employee does not benefit from the amount you tip

Credit:stackoverflow.com‘

About me

Hello,My name is Aparna Patel,I’m a Travel Blogger and Photographer who travel the world full-time with my hubby.I like to share my travel experience.

Search Posts

Latest posts

Popular posts