March 2004

by Betty and Dick Wood, Seattle, WA

My favorite hotel would be the Hotel Colmar Garni (Lange Strasse 34, Baden-Baden, GERMANY; visit www.hotelsingermany.com) because it has it all.

As an avid traveler and ITN reader, I thought I was familiar with most of the means by which people were separated from their money, but the following was a new one to me.

ITN brought to our attention exactly the right barge trip for us. We were to be in France in April ’03 to attend a World War I history conference, and French Country Waterways (Box 2195, Duxbury, MA 02331-9977; phone 800/222-1236 or 781/934-2454 or visit www.fcwl.com) was offering an itinerary through the Champagne region from April 20 (Easter Sunday) through the 26th.

My wife, Esta Lee, and I took a Russian river cruise between St. Petersburg and Moscow, June 4-18, ’03. We used Vantage Deluxe World Travel (90 Canal St., Boston, MA 02114; phone 888/734-0188), which had chartered the Novikov Priboy for several trips. The cost of the cruise was just over $3,000 per person, including round-trip airfare from Washington, D.C., all meals and most sightseeing.

We think Vantage did a first-rate job of organizing and overseeing the trip.

I definitely object to cruise lines automatically adding $10 per person per day (or any other amount) for collective tips for the staff.

I have always felt that the cruise lines’ system of demanding tips from passengers is invidious. Why do they not pay their staff a decent wage and absorb the cost in the fares rather than expect the passengers to do this as a “kindness”?

Some tipping is totally ridiculous. On a Princess line ship, we never saw the maître d’ for two weeks until the last night, when he started to make his smiling rounds of the tables. I was never quite sure of his function. . .

A tip is not a tip if it is mandatory or coerced. In that case it is a passenger service fee and should be listed along with port charges, transfer fees and whatever as part of the total cost of the trip.

My own preference is for the cruise lines to pay competitive, living wages to their employees and then have tips reserved for extraordinary service beyond what would ordinarily be expected.

Regarding tips being placed on passengers’ credit card bills on cruises, we have encountered this twice recently.

With reference to the growing trend of cruise lines to charge each passenger $10 per day for gratuities to shipboard staff, we booked for September ’03 an 18-day Mediterranean cruise on Cunard’s Caronia and noticed in their brochure that they would charge that much per day per passenger as a gratuity for shipboard staff.