What Service Is Worth: Tipping in Europe's Grand Hotels

Europeans tip less than Americans, and a great deal less than the internet suggests. Service is typically included in restaurant prices across France, Italy and Spain, and hotel staff are salaried rather than dependent on gratuities. The habit of rounding up survives; the habit of adding twenty per cent does not.

That does not make tipping meaningless. It makes it targeted. The porter who carries bags, the housekeeper who looks after a suite all week and the concierge who solves something genuinely difficult are the three people worth remembering, and in roughly that order of frequency.

A few euros per bag is normal for a porter. Housekeeping is better handled at the end of a stay than daily, left in an envelope at reception with the room number on it so it reaches the right person. Restaurants: round up, or leave five to ten per cent for a long dinner that went well.

The concierge is a different case. A small tip at check-in buys nothing. A proper one at the end of a stay, after they have found a table that was not available or rescued an afternoon from bad weather, buys a relationship for the next visit. The sums that matter are tied to what was actually achieved, not to the room rate.

In the United Kingdom a discretionary service charge often appears on restaurant bills; it can be removed if the service was poor, and staff will not be surprised if you ask. In Switzerland and Austria service is included and rounding up is the whole convention. Japan sits at the far end again — a tip is usually declined, and pressing it is an awkwardness for everyone.

The underlying rule travels everywhere. Generosity is noticed most when it is specific: the name of the person, delivered to their face, on the day it mattered. Money is only part of it, and rarely the part that gets remembered.