What People Get Wrong About Tipping Hotel Housekeepers
Experts share how often you should tip housekeeping staff, how much money, where to put it and more.
Hotel guests often interact with a number of staffers ― from valets to bellhops to lobby bartenders. And in these exchanges, it’s common knowledge to tip them accordingly.
But there’s one staff category that is often ignored in the tip department due to the fact that the labor often requires less face-to-face time: housekeeping.
“I must admit my ignorance,” life etiquette expert Juliet Mitchell, also known as Ms. J, told HuffPost. “When I first started traveling and staying in hotels, I didn’t know that you should tip the housekeeping staff. This, for many, is truly a faux pas borne out of ignorance.”
In 2017, The New York Times reported that fewer than a third of hotel guests leave tips for housekeeping staff. And even if they do tip, they may not realize that it’s important to do so for each day of their stay.
To help explain the rules around tipping hotel housekeepers, HuffPost spoke to a few etiquette experts. Read on for their guidance.
“You may occasionally pass hotel housekeepers in the hallways, but you rarely see how incredibly hard they work,” Jodi R.R. Smith, president of Mannersmith Etiquette Consulting, told HuffPost. “Rooms must be cleaned, carpets vacuumed, sheets changed, beds made, towels refreshed, bathrooms wiped and trash cans emptied. All of this must be done without disturbing the guests or their belongings — and in a short, and often timed, duration.”
The job is also more precarious than you might think. Housekeepers experience the highest injury rates in the industry due to the physically demanding and time-sensitive nature of their work, according to Unite Here, a labor union that represents more than 100,000 hotel workers in North America. Housekeepers also face additional risk of sexual harassment and assault, as the job generally entails working alone in strangers’ rooms.
