Gratuities - Do They End Up WIth The Staff?

There is no better subject in cruising to cause so many different opinions than gratuities, for starters what is a gratuity?

Here is an explanation from Wikipedia of what a gratuity is:

A tip (also called a gratuity) is a voluntary extra payment made to certain service sector workers in addition to the advertised price of the transaction. Such payments and their size are a matter of social custom. Tipping varies among cultures and by service industry. Though by definition a tip is never legally required.

So leaving a tip is a voluntary extra payment made by the cruise guest to the members of staff who serve them during their cruise, that's agreed - So why are cruise ship companies so involved in this area of cruising by continually putting guests off paying them direct to the staff members?.

My parents have just completed a MSC cruise from Hamburg to New York and as regular P&O cruisers like to pay direct to cabin steward, waiter etc, when they approached the reception desk to arrange this the following was said:


Guest: Please could you remove the gratuity charge from our account so we can tip as we like:

Reception Staff: Why?

Guest: Because we want to make sure the staff who work the hardest for us get rewarded accordingly.

Reception Staff: You cant do that, tell me how much you can pay and we will add that to your on board account.

Guest: So i can not tip who i would like to tip?

Reception Staff: no, we will make sure it gets to the staff correctly and don't like to guests to give direct - how about 100 euros?


The MSC brochure states that you can increase or decrease the amount but does not say anything about taking them off altogether so is this what every guest comes up against when trying to do this?

NCL, who are quite tough when it comes to gratuities state in their brochure that a portion of the service charge collected by them is also used for "fleet-wide crew welfare programs"

So what exactly is going on in the cruise industry regarding tips??

I think it is fair to say that cruise lines could be using the tips from guests as an extra income stream for the cruise line, I would hazard a guess that on a Royal Caribbean cruise for example you would get 70 - 80% of guests have pre paid gratuities or them added to the account, if this was on one of their larger ships you are talking about 2500 guests paying £40 per person on a 7 night cruise, 100k in gratuities in the bank of the cruise line!!

This makes me wonder about P&O cruises, if they can do it without getting guests to pre pay then why cant others? - with P&O you get an envelope at the end of the cruise and you tip as you see fit.

Cruise lines must be using the gratuity charge to fund other aspects of the cruise ship, so why don't they put it in the price at the beginning when you book? or how about telling guests what they are doing with the gratuity that they receive?

I don't think either of these things are likely to happen - it would then seem that they are more expensive than their competitor and would lose business from the outset - if they tell guests what they are doing with the tips will most guests refuse to pay?

Whats the solution?