Originally Posted by
xracer
If part of one's 2K+ per night is NOT filtering down to the staff at a place like Singita, then their claims of sustainability/community/conservation are a complete and total farce. Seriously, how can you claim to 'give back' when you don't even pay your own employees a decent living wage?
And by the way, the buzz words that I am using in the above paragraph come directly from the Singita.com website.
These places are operating in areas of terrible poverty, so certainly one would expect that their CSR efforts go a long way, and make a big difference to local communities.
Nonetheless, this isn't really indicative of whether or not lodges craft their packages for rangers / trackers in the expectation that tips will constitute a significant portion of their total compensation. Looking at the link I posted upthread, seeing what even 5* places are paying, I would think that it is a tacit industry norm that the low salaries on offer will be supplemented significantly by tips. Just as a benchmark: those salaries, for jobs which require quite high levels of skills and training, are in many cases quite a bit lower than what would be on offer for a driver in the Johannesburg area (think in-house courier, running letters around, pretty cushy undemanding job, requirement: driver's licence).