Jim asks:
Are musicians allowed to accept tips (money) from passengers on cruise ships?
Good question, Jim. I have never seen a musician not accept a tip, and I’ve never been on a ship that discouraged musicians from taking, or passengers from giving, tips. The final word on that, of course, would come from whatever cruise line hires you.
But that brings up a bigger issue of tipping in general.
Cruise ship etiquette says that you should always tip your cabin steward. When I was a crew member I gave about $1 a day. Basically, I’d give my steward $20 every 20 days or there about. As a guest performer, I give a little more – $10 a week, sometimes $20.
This tipping is usually not mandatory on cruise ships and you can give nothing if you want. (But you’re cabin steward will hate you and never clean your room right.) I say “usually” because recently I heard that that is not true. On NCL ships I’ve heard of a mandatory $5/day gratuity charged to guest performers. The $5 goes into a big pool for all house-keeping and gets distributed equally at the end of the cruise. The hitch on NCL is that the guest performer rooms are cleaned by the deck department and not the housekeeping department. Explain that!
On most cruise lines these days, the same kind of mandatory gratuity is charged to every passenger. On every line I’ve been on, it’s $10 a day per person. That means that if you and your wife and 2 kids go on a cruise, your family will be charge $40/day just for getting on the ship. This money is put into a pool for housekeeping and bar staff and distributed evenly at the end of the cruise. This system works about as well as communist Russia did when it instituted the same kind of socialism. Everybody gets the tip no matter what, so what’s the incentive to work harder?
Because of this system, you may find that passengers are much less likely to tip us musicians. They may think that part of their gratuity money is already going to you, or they may just feel like they are already paying enough. If you explain to them that their gratuity money doesn’t go to you – they tend to get upset as if they feel both taken advantage of by the cruise line and solicited by the musicians.
The piano bar guys are the ones that still get tips. People usually give a tip with a request, and that gig is built around requests.
David J. Hahn
David J. Hahn is a Broadway conductor and keyboard player. He co-founded MusicianWages.com with Cameron Mizell in 2008. Visit his new project, Songwriter.fm and sign up for his songwriting newsletter.
