Tipping Practices in Food and Beverage Operations: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Convention hotels with large kitchens and dining facilities contribute significantly to culinary sciences as laboratories for product and service innovations. In foodservice operations, services are intricately interrelated with tipping. However, the nature of tipping, rate of tipping, and effect of external and internal factors on tipping vary significantly across political and cultural boundaries as well as across types of foodservice operations. The current study investigates the role of employee gender in explaining the relationship between a hotel department and tip rates recorded using a secondary data set collected from a convention hotel. The results indicate that even within a hotel, tipping rates vary between the departments. Gender of an employee was also found to be an important factor. Relatively higher gender differences were noted between the in-room service department and bars with reference to tipping.

Keywords:

• Tipping
• hotel
• gender
• demographics
• tip dollars
• tip rate