Hello , we have never cruised before and are hoping to do 5 day Bahamas cruise with 3 grands, 14,10,7. How much to tip housekeeping, room service, bartenders etc. excursions . Thank you for any and all help!
Are you doing a Disney cruise? DCL gratuities are $16 per person, per night. I always choose to prepay them. This is for your wait staff and housekeeping. I believe an 18% gratuity is automatically applied to drinks at bars.
Excursions are pretty variable so I would take a look around Disney’s website.
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Thanks hopefully dcl!
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As mentioned above the automatically added gratuities are $16/person/night and those do go to your stateroom attendant who services the room (2x daily) as well as the serving team that follows you each night at dinner (your main server who takes food orders, your assistant server who does the drinks & the head server who oversees the staffing/scheduling and makes sure everyone is happy).
We have always added additional by going to guest services the last day to change the set amounts to higher. You can also use the envelopes they leave in your stateroom on the final night to add cash to and hand directly to your stateroom attendant and serving team.
As for room service, we typically do $1/item in cash and hand it to the person who delivers the food after they set it down on the table (and if for whatever reason we have less than 4-5 items, we’ll still tip at minimum $5 especially if it’s a plate of something, but as a family of 6 we’re usually ordering at minimum 4-5 things).
Don’t forget to have cash to hand off for your luggage both when you drop it of at embarkation to be delivered to your stateroom and then again if you get assistance from a porter at debarkation.
And then for excursions, we haven’t ever done a tour yet with a DCL excursion, but the language states:
You should never feel that gratuities are expected from you. However, it is customary to leave a tip in recognition of exceptional service at restaurants and in taxis, as well as for outstanding excursion guides and drivers. It is always up to you to determine the amount
So if you get served food or transported by a driver on an excursion and got good service, a tip is customary. I tend to tip 15-20% for restaurants, and 22-25% it was very good service. And for drivers if it’s a bus, $1 or so/person and if it’s a taxi, 15%. As for excursion guides, if they talked to me personally or made the trip exceptionally fun in some way, I tip higher, but if was standard tour, I still do at least $1-$2/person.
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On other lines, which also have an auto-gratuity, we always tipped a minimum of $5 for room service. We add extra gratuity to bartenders, etc. when service is great. We will also add more gratuity for our room steward(s) and others as needed. We take a couple hundred in cash. It’s a small amount to add to the budget considering how much cruises cost, especially when we know how hard the cruise staffs work and how little they usually make. That said, it’s not essential to tip extra. We will likely do the same for our first DCL cruise this year.
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I don’t know that there’s a standard tip for excursions. I recently did the guided nature walk tour at Lookout Cay and tipped a little over 10% because I thought the guide did an excellent job.
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Thank you! This is very helpful.
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Great info thanks!
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Thanks!