Hotel tipping fails to notice the unseen

The tip does not have to be big — $1 to $5, says the American Hotel and Lodging Association. But fewer than a third of hotel guests leave any money for the housekeepers.

The hotel association publishes a gratuity guide on its website that offers suggestions for tipping everyone from valet attendants to bellhops. But why are housekeepers often forgotten? A common explanation is that they are out of sight and, therefore, out of mind — that travellers are likely to tip only employees they directly interact with.

But another cause may be a simple lack of awareness. “As a general rule, people just don’t know they’re supposed to tip,” said Shane C. Blum, an associate professor of hospitality and retail management at Texas Tech University. The setting, he said, compounds the problem.

“Obviously, when you’re with a group of people, like at a restaurant, there’s social pressure to tip. In a hotel room, you’re usually by yourself and there’s not that social pressure.”

But even when guests are nudged to leave tips for the housekeepers, it does not always work. In 2014, two long-time housekeepers at the JW Marriott Santa Monica Le Merigot recalled, guests were regularly leaving cash tips when they checked out of their rooms, the result of the hotel chain taking part in The Envelope Please, an initiative started by the non-profit group A Woman’s Nation to make it easier for customers to show appreciation to housekeepers.

Envelopes were placed in 160,000 Marriott-managed hotel rooms in the US and Canada meant to be filled with notes and tips for cleaners. Within a few weeks, though, the envelopes vanished. “We heard that some guests felt the hotel was demanding tips for us,” Blanca Guerrero, a housekeeper at the Santa Monica Marriott, said through a translator. Tipping norms, or the lack of them, may be especially unfair to housekeepers, who arguably do more for guests than park their cars or push the cart containing their dinners.

Angela Lemus, a housekeeper at the Wyndham Boston Beacon Hill who makes $19.91 per hour, said through a translator that in addition to scrubbing tubs and taking out trash, she sometimes has to clean blood or other medical waste from rooms. Guerrero and another housekeeper at the Santa Monica Marriott, Aurelia Gonzalez, who makes $15.66 an hour, said their responsibilities include cleaning not just the inside of rooms but also the balconies attached to them.

Most housekeeping workers are women, a disproportionate number of them minorities and immigrants, according to Unite Here!, a labour union that represents thousands of hotel housekeepers in North America.

The profession’s earnings are less than the pay for housekeepers in other industries, such as hospitals ($12.74 per the Bureau of Labor Statistics). Pay rates vary widely by region.

Wage Watch, a company that tracks wage and salary information for the lodging and gambling industries, found that a housekeeper in a New York City hotel can expect to make an average of $29.41 an hour, while one in Charlotte, North Carolina, might earn an average of $10 an hour.

Housekeepers’ wages are comparable to desk clerks’, whose average hourly rate the Bureau of Labor Statistics tallies at $11.28. But desk clerk jobs do not require the flipping of heavy mattresses or exposure to cleaning chemicals that can lead to respiratory and other health problems.

Lemus, for example, developed an allergy to the latex gloves she was required to wear while cleaning. “It went on for years, and it got so bad my hands started to bleed. I couldn’t let people see my hands,” she said.

Yet housekeepers say that, without the gentle nudge of initiatives such as The Envelope Please, only about 30 per cent of guests leave a tip — a figure Blum found as well. “Some days someone will leave $5; other days, they leave nothing,” Lemus said. “Sometimes we get $2 or $3 in a room, and we get very happy. It makes us feel like someone appreciated us,” Guerrero said.

But sometimes, several days pass without a tip. Carmen Cruz, the manager of the four-diamond, 64-room Casa Madrona Hotel and Spa in Sausalito, California, said tipping trends in hotels are changing.

“Millennials travel a lot, and they’re not big tippers,” she said. “It’s because they’re independent, and they like to do everything themselves. They’re not looking for those extra services that an older couple may be, like, ‘Here, take my luggage.’”

Contrary to the situation in other hotels, housekeepers are among the most frequently tipped employees at the Casa Madrona, Cruz said. In addition to cultural background — Americans tend to tip more than European and Asian guests — length of stay is often a predictor of whether a maid will be tipped.

“If it’s a stay of more than a week, 90 per cent of the time they’re going to leave a tip for our ladies,” Cruz said. “If it’s a one-night stay, 90 per cent of the time they won’t leave a tip.” But she said she would never push guests, even those who have booked an extended stay, to leave tips for Casa Madrona’s housekeepers.

Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behaviour and marketing at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration who has studied tipping extensively, is well aware of the guidelines. “

Tipping etiquette experts have said for 20 years or more that you should tip hotel maids. But even I don’t do it all the time,” he said. “Half the time I don’t have the proper change in my pocket, or I forget.”

Both professors recommended a remedy for such cases, which would also work for business travellers who do not tip because they are unsure they will be reimbursed without documentation of the cash outlay.

“If hotels really wanted to institutionalise tipping, they could do it through electronic checkouts, or an app, or the TV, with a question like, ‘Would you like to leave a tip for your housekeeper?,’” Blum said. “We live in a tipping society. Even sandwich shops do that now. Why shouldn’t hotels do it?”

— New York Times News Service