Red Faces for Carnival Cruises

A small scandal is brewing after passengers on Carnival Splendor found an email pinned up in the crew quarters of the cruise ship during her most recent trip. The email listed the names of the passengers on board who had opted out of paying the optional service charge which is listed as a prepaid item on passenger accounts.

A sharp-eyed passenger spotted the email during a behind-the-scenes ship tour and alerted other travellers. Carnival’s head office team have said that this is ‘not protocol’, although they didn’t explain why this information was supplied to ship-board staff in the first place. It’s become standard practice for cruise lines to include a service charge in advance for all passengers, giving them a chance to refuse this standard payment in favour of tipping staff individually at the end of the cruise. The matter is complicated by UK law, which until this month, allowed an employer to include tips as part of a staff member’s wages, so that they paid tax on them. Of course the question in the minds of many passengers if whether they were marked out as non-tippers and given worse service as a result.