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Broadcasting from the Tripinsurance.com studios in Jacksonville, Florida.

This is Cruise Radio.

How's it going? My name is Doug Parker.

Thanks for checking out this episode of Cruise Radio.

Coming up a little later on in the show, we'll get a review of Royal Caribbean Serenade of the Seas, a 13-night Baltic Cruise.

Before we get to our first guest, I want to remind you about Cruise Radio News.

It's our Cruise Radio Facebook group and to remind you about Cruise Radio News. It's our

Cruise Radio Facebook group and our website, cruiseradio.net. All right. We've been getting a lot

of new listeners to the show and people emailing in talking about gratuities and tips. Call it what you

will. Joining me to answer some of your questions is Sherry from Cruise Tips TV. Hey Sherry.

Hey, Doug. You ready for these? I'm ready. Glad to be here. If there's one thing I've learned, I've learned that tipping is a very polarizing subject. Yeah, it's a little bit heated, isn't it? Yeah, big time. You put like one post about it and people are gouging each other's eyes out, like within a couple of comments. It's insane. So the first question says, how does cruise line tipping work? Well, major cruise lines have gone to basically an auto tipping system,

meaning that depending on the line you cruise, you charge probably around $12 to $16 per day per person,

maybe a little bit more for sweet. So you can either pay those gratuities before you cruise,

which is called prepaid gratuities, or at the end of your cruise on your stateroom account. And those charges cover basically the dining staff and the state room stewards and some of the behind the scenes crew. Do you remember back? I don't want to say back in the day because it was only a few years ago when there was actually envelopes in the state rooms? Yes, I do. And even after they phased out the envelopes, you could add money with envelopes. There were envelopes everywhere. They were in the, you know, in the atriums, in the state rooms. They were everywhere. I haven't seen one for months. I think that's one of the best things they've done, though, is added like auto gratuities it's definitely easier and

more convenient i think that the reason it's so controversial is because they call it gratuity

i think if they called it something like service charge or service charge i think people might

be a little bit more comfortable with it let's talk about people who want to adjust their tips

up or down because you can do that, right?

You can. And most people that I speak with and cruise with, they actually give a little extra cash to their room stewards or their waiters at the beginning or the end of the cruise, especially if they have extra requests.

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