As an update (probably final), the manager emailed me back with a thorough and thoughtful response, appreciating my feedback. I’m not the only person who has complained, and he indicates that they have ceased automatically posting this to the folio, but are actively offering it as an option at check-in and check-out. He says that the accountants told them to charge sales tax.

I do think that his intent is to offer a convenience for those who don’t carry cash or small bills. I also thinks he has a fuller appreciation now of how this appears to guests who were opted in without knowledge.

I will say that I was impressed with his response. If the opportunity presents itself, I may reconsider my decision not to stay at that property again.

I'm not sure how housekeeping gratuities are in anyway different to the service charge some properties add to the bill, often rolled up either into "taxes and fees" (or, cavalierly and with wild inaccuracy, simply "taxes").

My stay at the IC Semiramis in Cairo attracts 29% in these extras. Around half of this is the service charge.. Most Dubai hotels unashamedly inflate bills with a 12% service charge.

OK, the service charge is inescapable: hopefully the housekeeping nonsense can be struck out.

I’m at the HGVC in Vegas and hey charge for daily housekeeping if you want it. Why should a housekeeping tip be figured as a percent of my bill when I’m not getting the service?

I was the person that suggested the City Attorney. As I noted, it was meant as a scare tactic to stop the hotel from being wildly unethical. No (smart) business wants to be on the bad side of local government. Whether or not this was the appropriate party was basically irrelevant. The idea was to let someone locally know about the problem in order to scare the hotel into doing the right thing.

I have to agree. Tipping in the USA is an embarrassment. But all countries have their share of bas-aackward customs that have grown in stupidity over time. .

For sure. I have to wonder about the mentality of those who smear an entire country over one custom...

Yes, that would have been totally ridiculous and unfair.

So, this comment
isn't exactly that?

The US in the context of hotel staying, it is totally backwards that customers are expected to subidise or tip (or in this case "forced" to tip) for housekeeping. Your hotel rates are not exactly cheap to begin with. I can't think of any other major Western economy where customers are obliged to tip for service where companies just don't pay their staff well enough.

But it's not just tipping. Reading this forum on account of all the experiences faced at Hilton properties (and probably not just Hilton to be fair) in the US with the general attitude being charge the absolute highest price meanwhile giving the minimum amount of service with guests being treated like a minor inconvenience for having the gall to turn up to their hotels.

This isn't about tipping culture per say, as that's a different can of worms. The whole experience just puts me off visiting the USA.. can get much better service and often at a much better price by staying in other parts of the world.

Thanks for the clarification; I understand where you're coming from here. One quirk about the U.S. is that there's a lower minimum wage for positions that tend to be tipped (e.g. restaurant wait staff), so they really do depend on tips for their income, but hotel housekeeping isn't one of them. I don't tip housekeeping, and I certainly don't tip the barista at Starbucks (tip jars at quick serve places is absolutely absurd, IMHO). I don't think tipping those sorts of positions is really that widespread here, and I certainly don't think it's expected.

As an aside, I recall being surprised the first time I visited France that a service charge was added to the bill. I had thought it was customary in most of Europe to include all taxes and fees in the quoted price (something I wish would be practiced here - it's required for airline tickets but not hotels, hence the proliferation of the BS "Resort Fees").

Sorry. But I worked in the hotel industry for over 15 years. This was not done out of convenience for the guests. This was a revenue grab. Maybe to make up for lost revenue due to the pandemic, or to offset the costs of a local/state minimum-wage hike. A hotel manager should absolutely know better to not add a fee/surcharge to a guest's folio without informing them beforehand. Either at the booking process, at checkin, or via some sort of in-room notification. There are much better ways to allow for guests to add a housekeeping tip to their folio charges than by doing it this way. BTW, was this surchage added to people's folios even if they declined housekeeping services during their stay?

My superpower is giving people the benefit of the doubt. I suppose our greatest superpowers also tend to be our own kryptonite.

You may be right. I was still impressed with his reply. I’d be curious to learn if anyone else has the same experience going forward.

To answer your question, I only stayed one night. I don’t know if this was a per-night or per-stay charge, or how it was calculated if you declined housekeeping outright.

Part of the reason this one resonates is that it's part of a much bigger U.S. custom of treating certain types of workers very, very poorly. The notion that hotel staff should be paid vastly below a real living wage for the city they work in, and then appealing to a hotel's customers to help make up the shortfall, is appalling and speaks to a much bigger problem in our society than just a single custom.

I would love to see tipping eradicated from all modern economies. It's an antiquated, backwards custom that disempowers workers, perpetuates racial and gender inequality, and ultimately offloads responsibility from the wealthy to pay the true costs of running their business. But I know that's an uphill battle....see limited attempts to run restaurants as no-tipping that haven't gotten vary far...but preventing it from infecting a whole new class of workers is worth fighting for.

But this isn't the case with hotel housekeeping, only restaurant wait staff and a few others. The former are paid at least the federal minimum wage and not expected to earn tips. I won't delve too deep into the rest since it's getting into OMNI/PR territory, but it's a bit of a stretch to assume small business owners are wealthy and cheating their workers out of a fair wage out of greed - most small businesses, particularly in services like restaurants, operate on thin margins with heavy competition.

If the hotel industry could reset the "norm" - and have a paper trail of tipping, thanks to cramming on guest folios - how long do you think it would take them to lobby governments as necessary to reclassify housekeepers as tipped employees?