Tipping culture is out of control. Even now in the UK we have folk in coffee shops who's not moved, pressed a couple of buttons, swinging a tablet round with a 20 or 30% tip option minute you tap your card.

Completely agree with you. I live in Canada and Mobile Order from Starbucks every morning. Sure enough every time the App comes back and says "receipt and tipping available". Who am I tipping and for what? Someone pours a coffee and leaves it on a counter with a sticker that has my name on it. I walk in, pick up my coffee with ideally no interaction with anyone and leave. Please someone, help me understand what in that sequence deserves a 'tip'??

The point isn’t really that anyone ‘deserves’ a tip any longer, the point is that businesses worked out a long time ago they could exploit human psychology to lower their payroll costs by offering poor wages and then getting customers to supplement this by trading on their emotions / fear of social pressure. Marriott, as a US corporation, is obviously far along this curve.

Why does a waiter ‘deserve’ a tip when the kitchen staff on pretty similar wages apparently do not? I imagine there will be restaurants where all the wait staff are fired but the food is still prepared by humans before there are restaurants where all the food is prepared by robots, so it’s not that the wait staff are more important or arguably higher skill. One I never got.

… is a topic that is definitely best discussed elsewhere on FT, as it’s really not specific to Marriott.

Strange that we’ve had a lot of indignation, but no posted evidence that tipping has been introduced in the Marriott App. Is this an actual thing ?

Agree to get back on topic (Marriott) - here is your evidence - go to App Store and the latest app version has this as release notes:

Thank you for this. I see no problem with it and don't find it objectionable at all. It's not asking for tips, it's simply providing an alternate payment method for providing them if you so choose.

Further to the request in post #19, subsequent ‘tipping culture’ posts have attracted ‘bad post’ reports and have been removed.

So, what is this ‘Digital Tipping’ feature ? Is it in the ‘stay’ ? Or part of ‘checkout’ ? or ?

And for anyone who's seen the functionality, are you able to specify the recipient? I could see this being handy for me if I could specify housekeeping, for example, since it's easy for me to forget to have small (or usually any) bills on me.

I agree. I carry so little cash these days that finding appropriate bills to tip housekeeping, bellmen, etc. is a real challenge. I welcome the opportunity to tip electronically. I’m talking mainly about the U.S, where such tipping has long been expected and forms a significant part of the staff member’s income, but I would have appreciated it even in Athens this fall, where the service rendered my husband, who broke his foot while on the trip, was far above the ordinary.

I have not seen this feature on the app yet, but saw some similar electronic tipping options in a couple of U.S. hotels last year. I learned from that to be careful to distinguish between general categories, like “housekeeping” and the name of the particular person you particularly want to tip, which may also be an option. If the housekeeper has left a note in your room with her/his name on it, or a bellman has given you his card, chances are pretty good that there would be an option to tip by name, rather than department.

I find it interesting that Marriott will take and distribute tips on their app while also acting like they're simply a booking engine like Expedia when things go wrong like the Sonder fiasco.

Are they simply everything to everyone with responsibility to no one?

Unfortunately, that appears to be the sentiment of many who've posted in the Sonder fiasco responsibility thread (Why did Marriott get a pass on the Sonder fiasco?).

David

The existence and responsiveness of the Lurkers would seem a counterpoint to that opinion.

there's a simple solution to that

That “simple” solution is not so easy. My trips are often for 2 weeks or more, typically with 2-6 different hotels, with a big, heavy suitcase. Even if I just tipped everybody $5 to avoid carrying a huge stack of $1 bills, I’d generally need to carry around at least 20 $5 bills for daily tips to housekeeping, tips to bellmen, valets, etc., or alternatively, make several stops at the front desk in the hope they can change a $20 into smaller bills. (Something not all hotels will do.) Then there’s the trip to the bank to get all those fives, since my bank’s ATMs don’t dispense $5 bills. And I would also be spending more than necessary, since not every situation warrants a $5 tip.

Using cash to pay for smaller purchases so that I always have appropriate bills for tipping would mean accumulating a lot of heavy coins to carry around. That was tolerable for work travel, since I was only carrying the pocketbook for a short while, then setting it down in an office or somewhere, but now that my travel is all for leisure, carrying a heavy pocketbook when walking around all day is not acceptable. Making sure my pocketbook is as lightweight as it can be to carry for 8-10 hours at a time is a priority.

For me, the option to tip electronically is a big convenience.

there are ATMs literally everywhere