A housekeeper at a Marriott hotel is complaining that all of her tips are being stolen. Guests are asked to tip, but the tips aren’t making it to the person who cleans their room. Instead, this employee says, their manager keeps going room to room to pick up the money before housekeepers enter, “she would race to get in my rooms before me to check if they were “vacant.”
This manager “only works Monday through Friday” and housekeepers never receive tips during the week. Only weekend guests tipped, it appeared. So they set a trap.
One day she wasn’t supposed to work and we were really busy. I saw her coming down the hall my way. She was “checking rooms” so I quickly put 3$ in one of my rooms that I hadn’t marked vacant yet.
I watched her go in the room and leave. After she left I went in and sure enough the 3$ was gone. This was the confirmation I needed. She had been stealing my tips for MONTHS.
The hotel’s general manager, identified as working for one of about 18 Fairfield Inn properties in Minnesota, backed up the reported thief. He blamed “one of the guests” even though the door had been locked and according to hotel video surveillance, the manager had been “the only one to go in that room.” They said, ‘not enough proof’ and the general manager told the housekeeping manager who had tattled on her.
Hotels say that encouraging tipping saves them from paying higher wages. All that matters is that the employee gets more money, and that helps with retention. It doesn’t matter who does the paying.
Tipping is out of control. We now get presented with an option to tip even at airport self-checkout and at self-serve hotel breakfast buffets. At the Austin airport I was asked to tip when buying a water from a machine that was programmed not to accept $0 as an input. Soon we’ll be tipping AI chatbots. But when we tip we should at least expect the money to go where it’s intended.
At least when tipping is done via QR codes in rooms there’s some electronic record of the tip. It may still ultimately benefit the hotel in lower wage costs, but individual housekeepers who are expecting some average level of tips will be less likely to get shortchanged.
This also isn’t the first Marriott property that’s had trouble over tipping. San Francisco Marriott Marquis was found to have illegally kept $9 million in tips. In California, service charges that customers believe are tips belong to workers. That’s the same hotel which gave away a guest’s luggage to a thief, and fought in court to avoid compensation.
“Oh, goodie! The peasants are fighting among themselves!” —Oligarchs, as they steel billions from our public funds and resources, while distracting us with culture war nonsense.
That is like ebay. Once I had an item to sell. Ebay insisted that it was a prescription item even though it was not. The manufacturer’s website said so and they sell it without prescriptions. Ebay would not budge. I later got rid of it through Craigslist.
The reddit thread disputes this article’s claim of the SF Marriott taking $9M in tips. The thread says it was not housekeeping. It had to do with charges at a banquet.
I leave tips under my used pillows. Hope housekeeping management hasn’t caught on.
Nothing surprises me about this.
Years ago on a European trip we left our room and then realized we had forgotten something- As we walked up to our room the manager was exiting. Sure enough, the tip we had left for the housekeeper was gone. For the rest of our stay we sought out the housekeeper and handed our tip directly to her. I wonder how often this happens.
This has happened to me as well at a Hyatt Regency in Mexico City. I left the room for the elevator, noticed I forgot something and walked back only to see the supervisor walk out of my room while the tip was gone.
@1990,
The oligarchs are now managing Fairfield Inns?
Boy how the mighty have fallen!
In less than a month no less.
You can’t be serious
Pay your employees properly and tips suddenly stop being an issue.
Everyone is blaming Marriott but also remember that close to 90% of US brands (Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, IHG etc) are managed/owned by third parties. At the end of the day the Brand gets the blame but we should also call out the management companies running the hotels as THEY are the ones at fault and in many instances are responsible for employee wages.
@Steve: At Marriott, it’s 70% are franchised or licensed. At Hyatt, it’s less.