Woman Opts Out of Pre-Paying Gratuities on Her Royal Caribbean Trip. Then She Gets a Surprising Call: ‘This Is the First Time’
Maybe it's better to tip in cash.
Servers can get paid as low as $2.13 per hour, so they often have to rely on customer tips to make ends meet in today’s economy. But one woman learned that not all tips actually make it into staff’s pockets the way they should. Juuuuuelz shared in a video on TikTok how she decided to skip pre-paying her gratuity when she found out that Royal Caribbean allegedly uses gratuities to fund staff’s salaries.
Royal Caribbean usually requests its customers to pre-pay gratuities when they book with the cruise line. But for those who decide to opt out of pre-paying, they are charged a service gratuity on a daily basis while they are aboard the ship instead. According to their website, service gratuity can range from $18.50 to $21 per day.
In the video, Juuuuuelz claimed to have watched another video where she learned that staff members aboard the Royal Caribbean “do not receive extra” money from the gratuity that the cruise line encourages customers to usually pay upfront. Instead, staff members are allegedly only receiving the same amount that they would have earned without the gratuity.
Royal Caribbean staff don’t get extra with gratuity
“I just came across this girl’s video. She was talking about how Royal Caribbean staff members have been reaching out to her to tell her that, yeah no, in fact, they do not receive extra for those pre-paid gratuities,” Juuuuuelz said. “This whole fiasco where they’re not receiving those tips, they’re just getting the same salary.”
According to Juuuuuelz, the video had encouraged her to opt out of pre-paying her gratuity when she booked her 30th cruise trip with Royal Caribbean. “I always thought you had to do the pre-paid gratuities upfront. So this is the first time that I did not,” the Massachusetts-based woman said.
When Juuuuuelz completed booking her trip sans gratuity, the TikToker claimed that Royal Caribbean had reached out to her. “After I booked that cruise, guess who decided to call me? And guess what they wanted to talk about?” Juuuuuelz asked viewers. “Pre-paid gratuities. I literally hung up the phone. I was, like, ‘No, don’t worry. They’ll be getting cash tips from my pocket when I’m on there.’”
Guests have to directly remove the automatic tip
Per Royal Caribbean, guests can directly modify their gratuities through the Guest Relations desk onboard before the morning the ship disembarks, and they cannot be changed once the sail has ended. Supposedly, this is the only way to remove the service gratuity if the guest declined the pre-paid version. The cruise line itself also noted that the gratuities are “pooled and applied toward the compensation” of their staff members aboard the ship, seemingly implying that it funds their salaries based on the wording.
Juuuuuelz’s viewers seemed to agree that the gratuity was funding staff’s salaries, and urged others to tip in cash instead. “I go to guest services and remove them and tip cash,” one comment said. “Ya, I refuse to do auto gratuity anymore. I didn’t know it was just subsidizing a billion dollar company’s salary,” a user added. “They use the prepaid gratuities to pay the employees salary, they don’t get not 1 penny more than their contracted rate. They don’t split the gratuity like they say they do they literally use it to pay their base salaries.”
Other users even claimed that some purposely skip paying gratuity just to save on expenses: “Not paying gratitude is no longer optional thank goodness … for all those people who tried to get out of it! We not only pay the gratuities … we bring about $300 extra in cash, and on the last night we walk around and hand it out to our favorite people with a thank you note. kindness goes a long way.” In a separate instance, a man tried scoring a discount on a cruise using the “standby” trick.
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