We have been cruising since the early 1990s, and one of our favorite things to do is interview cruise staff members. Having considered and almost embarking upon a career on cruise ships, Tim is still fascinated by life on the seas. One of the more disturbing trends we’ve uncovered is the migration of your automatic daily gratuities from an extra few dollars in staff member pockets to a salary subsidy. Cruise companies are quite silent about your gratuities and how they’re really used, and many decline to comment on this delicate subject. However, for the past several years, cruise lines voluntarily allow the removal of automatic daily gratuities. That is suspect – leading us to believe these are voluntary contributions that may not go where you hoped they might.
THE AUTOMATIC DAILY GRATUITY SITUATION
Listen, Americans are good tippers, and the world knows this. Foreigners don’t like tipping, preferring to pay a little more to provide servers with a living wage, but for now, it is what it is. It’s widely known that cruise ship workers don’t earn a lot of money. With sometimes 10 to 14 hour shifts seven days a week, fortunate American passengers hope to share a little of their wealth with those hard working cruise ship employees.
About a year ago, we heard something about a potentially misleading method that allows cruise lines to allocate our Automatic Daily Gratuity funds to supplement guaranteed cruise worker salaries, instead of providing additional funds to those cruise workers in the form of tips.
Nah, couldn’t be, I thought. I mean, this has to be a lie. How could big companies get away with that?
So I looked over the supposed crew member pay stubs that were posted by angry or former cruise ship employees on Asian social media channels, and then shared to Reddit in the US.
And there it was. The tips area on these documents appear to reduce the cruise company’s guaranteed salary responsibility by the gratuity distribution amount.
But still, I thought this was incredibly misleading. Any reasonable cruiser would be correct to assume that an Automatic Daily Gratuity was just that – a gratuity, or better known as a “tip” here in the states. A tip is an extra fee paid to a worker by a customer to reward that worker for good service. As a matter of fact, it’s said the word TIP is actually an acronym for the phrase, To Insure Promptness.
So I attempted to call the cruise lines to verify that my Automatic Daily Gratuities were going to the correct departments. I began with customer service and ended up somewhere else, all passing the call along to someone else. No one could answer the question.
Surely, someone could verify that my gratuities were going to the hard working dishwashers and laundry workers, Finally, back on November 2nd, 2024, I drafted an email and sent it to the PR contacts at all the major cruise lines. Here’s what it read.
Fast forward to August, 2025. I have still not heard anything from any of the cruise lines we e-mailed.
This is troubling to a LOT of people. Like me, you may have been incorrectly assuming your Automatic Daily Gratuities covered all your tips. At $18.50 a day per passenger, my tips were $259 on my last seven day cruise, and that’s a healthy amount of money to share on top of what I already paid for my cruise. I thought it was incredibly convenient. One less thing I had to worry about so I could enjoy my vacation, right?
But, if that was the case, why are room attendants still leaving tip envelopes in my stateroom?
If what I read on Reddit was true, both you and I may have been unsuspectingly STIFFING those hard working cruise ship workers by trying to do the right thing.
Many cruisers are reporting that once they board the ship, they immediately remove their automatic daily gratuities by visiting the Guest Services desk. We tried it on four different cruise lines, and were able to remove these fees from our room with no trouble, often with no questions asked.
So what’s really going on here? Let’s dig into the math.
Most cruise workers don’t work directly for the cruise lines. They’re contracted by a third-party agency who is paid by the cruise company. They take a commission from each employee, and in return pay the employee a guaranteed monthly salary. The salary depends on the position, and we’re not sure what those numbers are.
So let’s do some rough math to illustrate.
Someone commented on one of our videos that a cruise ship dishwasher may make a guaranteed wage of $1000 a month.
Say everyone leaves their automatic daily gratuities on their room, and a bigger ship sails in peak season with 4,000 passengers. 4000 x 18.50 per person x 7 days = $518,000. Subtract taxes, commissions, fees, and whatever, divide it up among non-managers, and assume there’s, I don’t know, $200 left for each person.
Multiply that by 4 weeks to create a month, and $200 x 4 = $800.
So an average reasonable person would expect that $1000 a month dishwasher would get his $1000 guaranteed salary, plus a nice $800 bonus, for a total of $1800 that month for all his or her hard work. Doesn[‘t seem like a lot in America, but that’s a fairly healthy paycheck in some parts of the world.
But these documents are saying something else may be happening.
Instead of that hard working dishwasher getting a check for $1800, he’s still only getting the $1000 that was guaranteed in his contract.
So what happened to the $800 in tip money?
Well, that $800 is used to supplement his guaranteed salary. If that’s true, that means the contractor or cruise company is taking that $800 in tip money, and yes, they’re giving it to the employee, but then they may be reducing the amount they have to pay him or her. Now, the cruise line is only on the hook for $200 that month. Your tips paid the rest of his salary, and he got nothing else on top of that.
Oh, and some people think the 18% service charge on every bar drink also goes into that bucket. We don’t know this for a fact, but it’s definitely suspicious considering.
Now, the cruise lines are tricky. On their websites, there are statements about the Automatic Daily Gratuities that specifically state something to the effect of, on Royal Caribbean and Celebrity’s websites,
Or, as Carnival says:
NCL seems to be slightly more forthcoming with:
MSC says basically the same, although they’re a little more vague.
Royal Carnival, Celebrity, and NCL also state you can remove these charges from your room prior to disembarkation.
Turns out, according to the comments on one of our videos, a LOT of people are removing their automatic daily gratuities, opting instead to pay tips in cash to the people who served them. They’ll take that $129.50 or so per person and divide it up in cash between their room attendant, waiters, and favorite bartenders.
But this leaves the poor dishwasher and laundry worker with no extra tips, because you can’t really go visit these people on a cruise ship. If the automatic daily gratuity salary-subsidy situation is true, they weren’t getting any additional money anyway. Someone made a really good comment stating that even in an American restaurant, you don’t tip the dishwasher or cleaning people anyway. Some waiters and bartenders do split tips, but you get the gist.
And for those of you thinking of giving cruise workers ducks, or bags of candy, it’s a nice gesture, but candy doesn’t pay the bills.
So, what do YOU think about the Automatic Daily Gratuity situation? What have YOU decided to do? Subscribe as we continue to investigate this situation, and share your thoughts.
