Tips Up - Service Down!

[yogimax]

Just returned from the Sky and was surprised to find that tips had risen to $12 PP per day. Wow, that's about a 20% increase.

 

At the same time, service seems to have declined. The wait staff was slow to slower at the Crossings Dining Room. The room stewards were also disappointing. In the evening, they would knock on your door and ask if you needed anything. Instead of coming back later to service the cabin, they simply ignored it for the evening.

 

Seems, if you raise the cost of tips, service should increase. Instead, it was clear the dining rooms were understaffed and the room stewards were undermotivated.

[scchasgal]

Just returned from the Sky and was surprised to find that tips had risen to $12 PP per day. Wow, that's about a 20% increase.

 

At the same time, service seems to have declined. The wait staff was slow to slower at the Crossings Dining Room. The room stewards were also disappointing. In the evening, they would knock on your door and ask if you needed anything. Instead of coming back later to service the cabin, they simply ignored it for the evening.

 

Seems, if you raise the cost of tips, service should increase. Instead, it was clear the dining rooms were understaffed and the room stewards were undermotivated.

 

Sorry to hear the service was lacking on your recent cruise. Did you talk to the pursers desk or hotel director about cabin stewards? Talk to anyone about the dining room service? We found the dining room service very very slow in one dining room then we changed to the other and it was a significant difference.

 

The service charge has been $12.00 per day for quite a while now and should not have been a surprise to you. Since you are a 5k poster I am surprised you had not seen it on the boards prior to cruising.

[yogimax]

Sorry to hear the service was lacking on your recent cruise. Did you talk to the pursers desk or hotel director about cabin stewards? Talk to anyone about the dining room service? We found the dining room service very very slow in one dining room then we changed to the other and it was a significant difference.

 

 

Despite my post, I am basically not a "complainer." It would have to be something major for me to complain to the pursers or hotel director. Besides, what good would it do in regard to slow service from an understaffed wait service?

 

In regard to the cabin stewards, I would not want the individuals to get into trouble if they were simply following company policy.

[JohnIreland]

JSeems, if you raise the cost of tips, service should increase.

 

No , it's just good old fashioned inflation. It's been several years since the last rise.

[Ms belp]

Tips up, service down definitely did not apply to our cruise on the Spirit on March 29th. We had great staff and it was well worth $12/day. We left extra for several people. Our cabin stewards Herbert & Jacob even made me a towel animal to keep me company when I was laid up with a bad back. Karan is wonderful; arranged a wheelchair for me to disembark. I couldn't have asked for better service than on that Spirit cruise!:D

[mking8288]

We kind of had the same feeling too lately as having been on many NCL sailings over the last 10 years (next month - Gold level) - most recent being on the STAR last year to Alaska (we had a blast) and last month to the Mexico Rivera (had a great time & stay well within our cruise budget) and love their international crew. It's a very, very subtle sense, feeling & observation that DH and I noticed and not enough to call down to the front desk or complaint about.

 

We don't have issues with them raising the $10 to $12 p/p per day all inclusive tips (it's been fixed like that for many years) and it's just keeping up with the times & the crew work hard without a full day off for weeks/months at a time. Besides, we always recognize & reward exceptional services and tip accordingly, including room service.

 

We notice less scrubbing, polishing and cleaning during certain hours of the day/night while walking around, to/from the cafe/lounge/casino of the hand railings, elevators & other places compared to say 2 or 3 years ago - meanwhile, there're documented cases of noro-virus on many ship sailings. (or, did we go to bed early & they are doing it really late at night)

 

In the main dining room, they use to serve all your meals & extras, and come back to offer coffee & dessert service, etc. Sometimes, they will take your order all at once to save time, and will do it all. Now, even when we pre-order our dessert plus coffee, it seemed that they sometimes forget about it until prompted to. And, when we didn't order along with our entree, they simply clean the table & disappear without bringing the menu & offer tea/coffee, etc. Or, it would take so long that we simply changed our mind & get up to leave so that we won't miss the evening show in the lounge. Being freestyle dining, we had different crew in the MDR nightly so it's not just that one team or group of crews, some we knew or recognize from different ships that rotate/transfer with their contracts.

 

In earlier years, the room steward would see our DND sign and skip our cabin, somehow keep watch & knew when we leave for dinner and clean/restock & do the whole evening turndown service with the mints so that it's there when we come back from the show & after our meals. This last cruise, it seemed they come down the hallway, knock on the door despite DND knob on the dial, and simply offer us new towels, dash in to empty the waste receptable & refill the ice bucket, and then cheerfully say thank you & have a good night, and that's that for us (twice on a 7 night cruise) and they could've waited until 7 p.m. or 7:15 p.m. when we leave for a late supper to do our cabin, top to bottom & make the towel animals and all.

 

Perhaps a NCL cruiseship passenger's bill of rights & performance standards of expectations would be a good one to consider.

 

Another subtle thing is NCL has do away with the paper form of customer satisfaction survey that we all used to fill out, with a chance to win a prize on the morning of debarkation (remember those) - you get a chance to comment on good & bad, etc. & it's collected/shared/read by the captain and downward. Now, it's a post-cruise emailed survey to "randomly" selected pax - being green & eco-friendly, I agree - but what about my older brother/sister-n-laws who aren't computer literate and don't do emails and on-line surveys, they are excluded & have no chance of being in this scientific sample (whether it's a nice compliment or a minor service issue).

 

Since we all know that NCL's QI folks are reading these postings, please take note & share with management on what some of us are feeling lately, on a non-scientific basis. And, yes, we still love & prefer NCL over other lines - and ready to check out newer ships in our homeport, knowing that new ports of call are getting harder to find unless we fly & drive further for our embarkation.

 

P.S. It's a long post but .... get my nickels (5 cents) worth of comments in since I couldn't share more than my 2 cents worth of notes with NCL's online survey on our last 2 cruises.

[yogimax]

No , it's just good old fashioned inflation. It's been several years since the last rise.

 

Just for comparison on tipping:

 

RCCL - $9.75

Carnival - $10.00

NCL - $12.00

 

We have sailed all three lines and our feeling is that service is best on RCCL and worst on NCL, but that is just our opinion. My point is that the extra NCL charges does not result in better service.

[horsesrus]

Just for comparison on tipping:

 

RCCL - $9.75

Carnival - $10.00

NCL - $12.00

 

We have sailed all three lines and our feeling is that service is best on RCCL and worst on NCL, but that is just our opinion. My point is that the extra NCL charges does not result in better service.

 

We have always been happy with RCCL's service, can't yet compare NCL's will know after May. As we were researching NCL and comparing to RCCL we did notice that the service charge (tips?) are more on NCL but that NCL only changes for those 4 years and older, RCCL charges for all passengers regardless of age, that probably makes a difference for those with young children. For us, the difference of $54.00 (2.25 per person for 12 day cruise, 2 pax) didn't come anywhere near outweighing the huge savings in fare by switching to NCL. I guess if we find the service is lacking on NCL we may feel different; we shall see. :)

 

I think I have read just as many people complain about service on the RCCL boards as I have on the NCL boards so I'm going in with an open mind.

[Pinkbikini]

We found the service to be severely lacking on our cruise on SPIRIT in February and let them know as we were randomly selected for an email survey a few weeks later. I wondered why we didn't get a paper survey the last night of the cruise!!!

 

I had a laundry list of complaints on this cruise after LOVING our first cruise on the Sun just 1.5 years before! I thought we had possibly gotten used to a higher level of service on our Princess voyage last November and was judging them unfairly. It's good to know that others have noticed a change in service and quality as well. We love freestyle cruising but may reconsider another NCL voyage based both on the quailty of our Feb voyage and the lack of response regarding our survey and emails to our personal cruise reps...

[horsesrus]

We found the service to be severely lacking on our cruise on SPIRIT in February and let them know as we were randomly selected for an email survey a few weeks later. I wondered why we didn't get a paper survey the last night of the cruise!!!

 

I had a laundry list of complaints on this cruise after LOVING our first cruise on the Sun just 1.5 years before! I thought we had possibly gotten used to a higher level of service on our Princess voyage last November and was judging them unfairly. It's good to know that others have noticed a change in service and quality as well. We love freestyle cruising but may reconsider another NCL voyage based both on the quailty of our Feb voyage and the lack of response regarding our survey and emails to our personal cruise reps...

 

Would you mind elaborating on your list of complaints, we'll be on Spirit next January and we'd be interested in hearing more about your experience.

 

We don't intend to let anyone else's negative experiences cloud our opinions of NCL, we'll make our own decisions based on our experience. However, it would be interesting to hear about any issues others have experienced. Unfortunatly, most of the stuff I read here on the boards is so non-specific and leaves you kind-of wondering...

[Ms belp]

Same ship, one month apart, and totally different experiences. Just goes to show ya'.:confused:

[sottovoce]

I suspect that when someone is surprised to find the auto-gratuity has gone "up" the natural reaction is to perceive the service to be "down." Based on our experience on Jade in December I don't buy it for a minute.

 

We get the same reaction here from first-time NCL cruisers who are not accustomed to the auto-gratuity and immediately rush here to pontificate how there is no motivation to provide good service because of the auto-gratuity, blah blah blah, blah blah blah. I don't buy that one bit either. We've always had professional but very friendly service on our NCL cruises...every bit as good as we've had on other mass-market cruise lines, including the ones who erroneously refer to themselves as "premium."

 

At $12/day it's still a bargain, as far as I'm concerned.

[Ms belp]

Would you mind elaborating on your list of complaints, we'll be on Spirit next January and we'd be interested in hearing more about your experience.

 

We don't intend to let anyone else's negative experiences cloud our opinions of NCL, we'll make our own decisions based on our experience. However, it would be interesting to hear about any issues others have experienced. Unfortunatly, most of the stuff I read here on the boards is so non-specific and leaves you kind-of wondering...

 

See my post #5; I had a wonderful time on the Spirit out of New Orleans and I can be specific. We had cabin 11660 and it was the best cabin of all of our cruises so far. We had wonderful cabin stewards, "Jacob" and Herbert who took care of us, honored the "do not disturb" sign when I slept in. They even made me a towel animal "Dumbo" elephant to keep me company when I was stuck in bed with a bad back.

 

Karan was wonderful as well. He arranged to have the room decorated for Chris' 40th birthday, even though I brought the decorations from home, didn't purchase from NCL. He made special arrangements for our CC "Meet & Greet" group to have special tendering on excursions. He visited with us during the White Hot Party, even though I was in the smoking lounge, not the party, close enough to hear the music but more comfortable. He also arranged for a wheelchair to arrive in my cabin for disembarkation since my back was still bad. They took me all the way to the shuttle bus that would take us to the airport.

 

Anan, bartender on the Spirit, whom we had met on our first cruise was just as nice as ever. He makes good drinks and caught us up on what is going on with him since we last saw him. (He has a 9 month old daughter now.):)

 

The outside deck from our stateroom was clean and well tended. I could go out there early in the morning and get fresh coffee, watch the scenery, and say hello to the staff as they went by, tending to their various duties.

[horsesrus]

See my post #5; I had a wonderful time on the Spirit out of New Orleans and I can be specific. We had cabin 11660 and it was the best cabin of all of our cruises so far. We had wonderful cabin stewards, "Jacob" and Herbert who took care of us, honored the "do not disturb" sign when I slept in. They even made me a towel animal "Dumbo" elephant to keep me company when I was stuck in bed with a bad back.

 

Karan was wonderful as well. He arranged to have the room decorated for Chris' 40th birthday, even though I brought the decorations from home, didn't purchase from NCL. He made special arrangements for our CC "Meet & Greet" group to have special tendering on excursions. He visited with us during the White Hot Party, even though I was in the smoking lounge, not the party, close enough to hear the music but more comfortable. He also arranged for a wheelchair to arrive in my cabin for disembarkation since my back was still bad. They took me all the way to the shuttle bus that would take us to the airport.

 

Anan, bartender on the Spirit, whom we had met on our first cruise was just as nice as ever. He makes good drinks and caught us up on what is going on with him since we last saw him. (He has a 9 month old daughter now.):)

 

The outside deck from our stateroom was clean and well tended. I could go out there early in the morning and get fresh coffee, watch the scenery, and say hello to the staff as they went by, tending to their various duties.

 

Thank you for the detailed information! Is 11660 a suite? We'll be in an AD and we've read a lot of good things about Karan. We hope he's the concierge when we sail next year!

[njhorseman]

Thank you for the detailed information! Is 11660 a suite?

 

On the deck plan 11660 appears to be a balcony stateroom, not a suite.

[Richie2pies]

$12 on NCL, $10.50 on Princess. The service is much better on Princess. However, NCL cruises are usually cheaper. Pay your $$$ and take your choice. I have lately gone to Princess because of their liberal policy on bringing wine, etc, on board. NCL has become ****s on booze. I spend in the bars, but I also like to have a drink on my balcony without paying for an overpriced "set-up" or a corkage fee for a bottle of cheap wine.

[Hikini]

I'm sorry to hear you feel that the service has gone down. Hopefully that was just yours (and a one time) experience. On 4 previous cruises with NCL I can't say enough good things about the service we've gotten. Since our last cruise it has gone up to $12 pp/pd, but even so, I still feel that is a bargain considering just how many people serve us in a day.

 

We always tip extra for the room stewards because I appreciate so much what they do and their attentiveness. It is not a requirement at all, but on the last couple of cruises we left a tip on the first day. It was about half of what we would normally leave in a lump sum at the end of the cruise. We have had excellent service - not one thing to complain about there. (We left the other half at the end.)

 

I sure hope it is the same service we've experienced when we are aboard the Pearl in 20 weeks. (But who is counting?!):D

[davrap222]

I just sailed on RCCL and will be sailing on NCL again in a couple of weeks. I thought the service on RCCL overall was excellent. Very few complaints. I recall getting off the ship and thinking I would have the opportunity to compare the two lines like I never have before because I have not sailed both in such a small period of time between cruises. I seem to forget after about a year between cruises. With that said, my last cruise on NCL was on the Dawn in 07 and that was excellent. Come to think of it, all the cruises I have been on have had good to excellent service, so maybe I am very easy to please! I will report back on my comparison. Happy sailing!:D

[islandgirlejfan]

There is a very long thread in the Carnival forum about this very same thing. There are a number of unhappy ppl where service in concerned over there.

 

I am just wondering where the $9.75 for RCI is because when I was looking at the *gratuity guidelines* yesterday and this is what I pulled up:

Suite attendant: $5.75 USD a day per guest

Stateroom attendant: $3.50 USD a day per guest

Dining Room Waiter: $3.50 USD a day per guest

Assistant Waiter: $2.00 USD a day per guest

Headwaiter: $.75 USD a day per guest

 

That added up to $15.50 a day pp....$3.50 more than NCL.:eek:

[scchasgal]

There is a very long thread in the Carnival forum about this very same thing. There are a number of unhappy ppl where service in concerned over there.

 

I am just wondering where the $9.75 for RCI is because when I was looking at the *gratuity guidelines* yesterday and this is what I pulled up:

Suite attendant: $5.75 USD a day per guest

Stateroom attendant: $3.50 USD a day per guest

Dining Room Waiter: $3.50 USD a day per guest

Assistant Waiter: $2.00 USD a day per guest

Headwaiter: $.75 USD a day per guest

 

That added up to $15.50 a day pp....$3.50 more than NCL.:eek:

 

I think the one that posted the prices did not include the suite since not everyone has that luxury.

[islandgirlejfan]

I think the one that posted the prices did not include the suite since not everyone has that luxury.

 

I didn't even catch that honestly! :p

I still see $12 as cheap....most of these ppl work hard for their money.

[scchasgal]

I didn't even catch that honestly! :p

I still see $12 as cheap....most of these ppl work hard for their money.

 

I totally agree people just don't get it.

[G-Funk]

$12 on NCL, $10.50 on Princess. The service is much better on Princess. However, NCL cruises are usually cheaper. Pay your $$$ and take your choice. I have lately gone to Princess because of their liberal policy on bringing wine, etc, on board. NCL has become ****s on booze. I spend in the bars, but I also like to have a drink on my balcony without paying for an overpriced "set-up" or a corkage fee for a bottle of cheap wine.

 

$12 on NCL and a suggested amount of $10.90 on Disney (based on 7 day cruise). Speaking from experience, there is NO comparison between service levels the two, Disney is so much better!

[Don Haynes]

I would rather pay NCL's increased surcharges than pay the much higher price for Disney's fares. Don't confuse the issue with surcharges, its the bottom line that counts.

[njhorseman]

I would rather pay NCL's increased surcharges than pay the much higher price for Disney's fares. Don't confuse the issue with surcharges, its the bottom line that counts.

 

 

You're absolutely right about the bottom line, but anyone trying to sell a mass market commodity-type product or service knows that a flashy, low advertised price is the bait that gets a lot of the fish to bite.