If you’ve had a flight attendant go that extra mile to make your flight a great one, it might seem like the best way to show your appreciation is to offer them a tip. Something that goes directly to them. After all that’s what you do in the service industry right? Especially when the service is exceptional.
Except service is only part of the job of a flight attendant, and while cabin crew are there to serve, they are far from servants. Thinking they will chase your dollars and provide you better service because of the inducement of a potential tip is severely misplaced. Not all crew may agree, but for many there’s something cheap about being offered a tip from a wealthy person, as if we don’t make enough money as it is, and we need your charity. At the moment, most flight attendants receive a respectable wage, but the advent of tipping as the norm could throw that all into doubt.
Fortunately many airlines don’t permit crew to accept tips at all, but recently the announcement that Frontier Airlines introduced an option to tip your flight attendant when paying for food and drinks is a worrying development and the start of encouraging a tipping culture that should never see the light of day in the airline industry.
It’s no surprise that the United States is the place in particular where tipping your flight attendant is gathering momentum. After all it’s the land of tipping for everything as trivial as the extremely arduous task of someone hailing you a cab. But if tipping takes to the skies, instead of just small hospitality businesses outsourcing their wage obligation to customers, airlines will be sure to follow suit. Airlines, who should definitely be in a position to pay their employees a living wage, will over time use the fact crew receive tips as a excuse to shirk their responsibility to pay what they traditionally had. It’s a very slippery slope.
All Passengers Deserve The Same Service
Besides, crew are just doing their job serving you on board. Like what happened in USA restaurants, tipping for exceptional service slowly becomes tipping for any service at all. That’s not fair to passengers, especially those from abroad who are not accustomed to having to tip, then being faced with the awkward question of how much and when they should tip. Do we really need another place where there is a confusing and complicated tipping etiquette?
At it’s worst flight attendants chasing tips could result in attention only given to the few passengers who seem likely to tip, while the rest of the people – often those who forked out a significant amount for the airfare are ignored. Everyone should receive equal service no matter their capacity to tip, and a tipping culture throws all that into question.
Tipping Prioritises Safety Before Service
It also throws into question the ability of cabin crew to do their safety related duties. First and foremost flight attendants are there for safety, and this shift into tipping for service muddies the water about what their role actually is. If flight attendants are preoccupied with chasing tips, their focus on enforcing safety related procedures is likely to be diminished.
This means, in a practical sense, a flight attendant might be less likely to tell a passenger to stow their oversized laptop in the overhead compartment for take off, if they think their strict directive might jeopardize their chances of a tip. Cabin crew need to be able to be assertive with passengers to control the myriad situations they can face on board. The airlines they work for should always empower them to do just that. Having part of their pay packet dependent on tips, will divert their focus to simply doing whatever they can to ensure a tip, at the expense of neglecting much more critical duties.
A tipping culture would also affect the way that passengers see flight attendants, and further reduce the respect they should be afforded as primarily safety professionals. There’s already a perception of cabin crew as just wait staff in the sky – do we really need something else that helps to further entrench this stereotype?
Most cabin crew would much rather be treated with respect and be given a thank you for providing good service. As a flight attendant, a sincere ‘thank you’ is something that often takes you completely by surprise, and can really make your day in what can be a thankless job. If you really want to take your appreciation further, write letter to the airline, and mention the crew by name. It carries much more weight than a few dollars stuffed into the hand, no matter how well intentioned it seems.
