As part of my preparation for any trip I take for work, I make sure I have some cash to tip the housekeeper who cleans my hotel room. That usually entails me asking my wife if she has any cash on her or making a trip to the ATM.
I would imagine most other travelers who are aware that it’s customary to tip housekeepers do something similar because, for the most part, people don’t often pay in cash anymore. We have debit and credit cards for most transactions, and now there are services people can use to easily send each other money through a few clicks in an app.
Recently I was reading a story by HNN’s Trevor Simpson from the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference about a hotel development panel when a quote from Vision Hospitality’s Mitch Patel stood out to me. It was about the industry’s slow adoption of new technology and how it needs to deploy tools to improve guest satisfaction, such as an easier way to tip housekeepers.
“We live in a cashless society, who carries cash with them anymore? We want to tip, but many times we forget or don’t have the cash to do it …. Why can’t we make it easy?” Patel said.
When I read that, I thought to myself, “He’s right. Why isn’t it easier to tip housekeepers?”
From a guest’s perspective, it’s easy to forget cash when heading out the door for a trip if they’re not expecting to need cash to pay for meals or other expenses. For those who don’t realize they should tip housekeepers, there’s nothing in hotel rooms that indicates they could or should tip, so they don’t.
Having some kind of mobile function that allows guests to tip their housekeepers would make it so much easier for guests to do so. I imagine it would also increase the number of guests who do actually tip because there would be some kind of prompt to do it. If you’re worried that would turn off some guests, think about how often we run into this elsewhere.
Just got dropped off by your Uber or Lyft driver? How much of a tip would you like to give? Got your food delivered or grabbing some takeout? How much would you like to tip? Picking up your dog from the groomer? Leave a tip. It’s everywhere.
Having this function in an app, most likely through a brand, would make tipping so much easier and much more frequent. Make it possible for a guest to request daily housekeeping for their room and then ask if they’d like to leave a tip ahead of time. After a guest checks out, ask them to give a review or rating of their stay and then ask about a tip for their housekeeper.
Now, I’m by no means an IT expert, but I’m sure this would require making different systems talk to each other, and that’s not necessarily easy. Perhaps that’s been the obstacle, at least in recent years, from making something like this a reality. It just wasn’t worth the headache of figuring out how this would work from a tech standpoint or from an operations standpoint.
But maybe it is now.
The hotel industry is still struggling to hire and retain talented employees at all levels, but the on-property staff are the ones who are directly providing hospitality to guests. Regardless of your opinions on rising wages, we all know that pay plays a significant role in a person’s decision to take a job. The Washington Post recently reported that while the pandemic has led to higher tips for delivery drivers and restaurant servers, housekeepers are among a number of workers who have been left out of this tipping boom.
Imagine being able to tell prospective or current housekeeping employees that not only will they be earning a competitive wage, but there’s now an app function that prompts tips for housekeepers and makes the tip process as easy as a few clicks. That could do wonders for hotel companies competing with other industries for employees.
For employees, there are certainly some tax implications of cash tips versus ones delivered through a company that I won’t delve into deeply. But the potential to make tipping housekeepers easier and more routine should still tip the balance in favor of digital tipping.
It’s easy for me to write about this concept generally without having to figure out all the details, like having to get different systems to work together or making sure a guest’s tip goes to the housekeeper who cleaned that guest’s room. I wish I had the answers, but I think that if you want to get an edge on hiring and retaining dedicated workers, this is something at least worth evaluating.
The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.