With Contactless Service on the Rise, How Should You Tip Hotel Workers?

As COVID-19 spread, many hotels instituted new contactless measures of check-in, intense deep-cleaning methods, and other hygienic implementations to assure guests’ safety and reduce physical interaction without losing that personal, human touch that sets hospitality apart. Yet these new touchless practices are by no means exclusive to a pandemic year.

 Contactless service is set to be the new normal, and that means getting comfortable with new ways to carry out age-old services. For managers, workers, and guests alike, how will the rise of contactless service affect tipping – a practice that has remained virtually unchanged for decades?

 We can’t say we didn’t see this coming. Cash has been on the decline since before COVID hit and is even more so now. At some point, this will have to spill over into the way tips are given and received. At the same time, as vaccinations pick up and travel resumes, hotel service workers are putting in more work under harsher conditions than ever before. Surely, it can be argued that these workers deserve a living wage without needing to rely on tips; however, unfortunately at this stage in our world and our economy, tips are the make-or-break factor for these employees. With all the effort they’re putting in to welcome visitors back through hotel doors, tipping is the least guests can do. There just needs to be a simpler and more modernized way for them to do it.

 Hospitality staff have notoriously faced stumbling blocks that other service workers don’t in terms of tipping. Unlike waiters and waitresses, there’s no way to add tips to a receipt. And now with COVID, tips left behind in cash out of the good of guests’ hearts may not be considered safe or something workers are comfortable taking. Digital payments are safer from a health perspective, and they’re easier for everyone – from the guest doing the tipping to the employee receiving the tips to the GM managing it all.

 Hotel workers need to be tipped, now more than ever. eTip is revolutionizing hotel tipping, making it as easy on the tipper as it is on the recipient (in fact, hotels that use eTip see an increase of as much as 78% in tips for their workers).

Learn more about how eTip is changing the tipping game.