The Tipping Point
July 22nd, 2008 by Tim Uden
For travellers not used to the custom, tipping is one of those strange American customs that can make you feel totally uncomfortable.
For starters you are bribing someone for simply doing their job and the question of how to tip is just as difficult as how much. Many people find the concept of paying a bribe somewhat sleazy and the action of leaving extra money feels a bit dishonest.
In most parts of the world you won’t cause too much offence if you simply pay the amount advertised on the menu, but if you’re travelling in the United States or Canada then tipping is almost unavoidable especially if you plan on eating out.
For years the standard tip has been an additional 15% in restaurants and $1 per drink in bars – that’s right, in North America you are expected to tip in bars as well – however North American attitudes to tipping are based largely on guilt and most people now regard 15% as the bare minimum with 20% becoming the new standard.
In bars in the United States it is common to tip an extra dollar per drink. An extra dollar is excessive, but when everyone else does it you have to do it too, unless not tipping is an advertised policy.
During happy hour, an extra dollar can be 50%. Even 15% is often way more than the profit margin of the guy who owns the bar, yet the bar staff have invested nothing in the business other than their own time.
Some – mostly American – travel guides have huge sections devoted to tipping. Apparently if you stay in fancy hotels you are expected to tip virtually everyone from the guy who opens the door for you to the person who cleans your room. Based on this, I certainly wouldn’t want to stay in a nice hotel in the States.
Fortunately hostels are tip-free zones. The average backpacker comes from a country where tipping isn’t an entrenched custom and the low budget emphasis means that it would certainly be unusual if a guest started throwing their money away. This means that a bar in a hostel should also be tip-free. If it isn’t, then the hostel deserves every bad review they get.
A standard argument is that tipping is necessary because the staff get paid so poorly. I have been told that some get paid as little as $2.15 hour.
$2.15 is not much, but you can afford to pay a little more if you charge more for the drinks. The customer pays the same but they don’t feel like they need to bribe the staff just so they do their job. The whole process of tipping is really intimidating for many travellers and for this reason a hostel bar is often popular with travellers as a hostel is one place where travellers feel they don’t need to tip. Many travellers would prefer to drink in a hostel bar over a regular bar for this reason alone.
Wages are just another cost of doing business and paying staff is the business owner’s responsibility, not the customers’.
I have had low paying jobs like stacking shelves in supermarkets, packing CDs in a warehouse near Heathrow, clearing tables in a bar in Auckland and carrying customers’ groceries to their cars in Melbourne and I have never been tipped nor expected a tip. In fact I probably would have felt uncomfortable if someone tried to tip me.
The American attitude toward tipping seems to be motivated by guilt and the desire to appear generous in front of your friends. In America it is considered bad form to give a bad tip even though the service may be appalling.
It is one thing to tip in Canada and the US, where it is an accepted custom; however it is quite another thing when North Americans insist on tipping when they travel abroad. I, and I am sure that I am not alone here, do not appreciate it when this custom is introduced to other countries.
Most people I know don’t regularly tip, but in Australia it is starting to catch on especially in trendy inner-city neighbourhoods. My local fish and chip shop in San Remo (1½ hours south-east of Melbourne) lost my business the moment they put a tip jar on the counter. Now I drive an extra few minutes to White Salt in Cape Woolamai on Phillip Island, where I have discovered the fish is so much better. My local fish and chip shop lost a regular customer through the selfish act of soliciting a bribe and I’ll never return now that I have found somewhere better.
I don’t know about you, but I think that a fish and chip shop is not the sort of place where you should tip anyway. Even in America I doubt most people would tip in a greasy take-away with no table service.
When I travel in the US I find I can avoid tipping by staying in hostels, frequenting fast food places or food courts in shopping centres and buying most other food and drinks from supermarkets. However sometimes it is nice to go to a bar or linger in a cafe, especially if there is a free Wi-Fi connection and in these cases you are entering tipping territory. It puts the customer in an uneasy situation and making the customer feel uncomfortable is certainly not good customer service.
Fortunately a handful of restaurants in the US are bucking the trend. The Linkery in San Diego is one that I will make the effort of visiting next time I’m in California.
I sometimes like to eat out and I like to be in a comfortable environment where I feel welcome and relaxed and am treated well regardless of how much money I have. If I am paying full price for my meal – and eating out is an occasional treat – then why should I feel that I need to pay a bribe just so the restaurant staff do their job. Really is my meal worth more simply because a waitress draws a smiley face on the bill?
Tipping doesn’t play a big part in increasing customer service particularly when tips are given regardless of service (see “Tip Levels and Service: An Update, Extension and Reconciliation” by Michael Lynn of Cornell University, 2003, and “Incentives and Service Quality in the Restaurant Industry: The Tipping – Service Puzzle”, by Ofer H. Azar of Ben-Gurion University, 2007). If anything tipping only decreases the customer’s guilt.
I wouldn’t pay an extra 15-20% to a used car dealer so why do the same in a restaurant or bar? Restaurants should just raise the prices by 20% (so they can pay higher wages) and then add the tax to the price (advertising prices exclusive of tax is another annoying thing about America that would be outlawed by deceptive advertising laws elsewhere in the world) and then let customers pay the advertised price.
Changes to BUG’s forums
July 9th, 2008 by Tim Uden
We’re currently in the midst of a big upgrade to the forums.
This involves upgrading the software (done), updating the design so it matches the rest of the site (expected to be finished by the end of the day) and fixing the travel journals.
We’re making good progress with this, however in the process we have introduced a bug that is preventing people from reading forum posts. I have someone working on this and everything on the forums should be working again shortly.
Tourist information centres: as useless as tits on a bull?
July 3rd, 2008 by Tim Uden
Many people rely on tourist information centres whenever they travel. They are often a good place to get free city maps and find details on new attractions and accommodation options that may not yet be in travel guidebooks.
As someone who writes travel guidebooks, I set off with a list of every known hostel in each destination. But I’ll always try to visit an information centre to see if there are any new hostels that I somehow wasn’t able to find out about. We include every single known hostel in our guides and this is a good way to ensure that we don’t miss a single hostel.
Tourist information centres are not always so helpful and sometimes the people who work there can be as useless as tits on a bull. Sometimes they have an ulterior motive to promote members of the local tourist association at the expense of - often better - non-members and sometimes they are just plain clueless.
Many tourist information centres are funded by membership in the local tourist association. Hotels and local tourist attractions pay a membership fee that goes towards covering the information centre’s expenses and promoting the destination. When you visit the tourist information centre they will only tell you about their members and in some cases they will lie to you and tell you that other places don’t exist and even tell you to avoid the non-member businesses.
If you are travelling in Western Australia you may see flyers advising you against a certain hostel and telling you about a, supposedly better, alternative. You’ll see these flyers in hostels (particularly YHA hostels) and tourist information centres. The hostel is not particularly good, but it is no worse than many other hostels in the region, particularly other hostels that display the flyers advising you to avoid the hostel. The recommended alternative is not a hostel at all, but some cheap rooms above a pub with a depressing and unwelcoming atmosphere. Word on the street is that the tourist information centre is bullying the hostel because they refused to join the tourism association - that’s about as childish as union members bullying workers who choose not to join their union.
Because many information centres are funded by membership fees, the information centre’s job is to promote those businesses rather than give you honest advice. An example I experienced is the information centre in Coober Pedy, South Australia. I called in and asked about the hostels; I was told where the hostels were but after asking which was best I was told, “I’m not allowed to tell you that”! That’s because they can’t be seen to recommend one place over another. It is hardly a place to come to for honest unbiased advice.
Sometimes the information centres are just plain clueless, particularly if you don’t represent the average visitor to that destination. A few years ago on a trip around the UK I called into the information centres in Birmingham and Leeds (at the time neither city had any hostels) and asked about hostels in the local area, in both cases I was given a list of homeless shelters. That’s like asking the opening hours of the city museum and being given directions to Boots the chemist.
When you’re travelling it is important to see tourist information centres for what they really are: a good place to get free maps and ask directions to local attractions but not a place for independent unbiased advice.
We’re back online
June 2nd, 2008 by Tim Uden
This weekend there was an explosion and fire at the data centre in Texas that hosts BUG’s servers, which meant the our websites were down for almost two days.
On Saturday afternoon (Houston time) electrical gear shorted causing an explosion that knocked down three walls. No servers were damaged, but the electrical supply was disrupted. Although the data centre had backup generators, the Houston fire department required that all generators be shut down, bringing down 9000 servers and around 100,000 websites (my estimate as most servers host at least 10 websites).
Everything has now been resolved and we’re back online.