I was on a Southwest flight earlier this month and received really excellent service from one of the flight attendants.
I decided I would give her a tip and then stopped: “can we tip flight attendants?”
We tip just about every other service employee: waiters, bartenders, cab drivers, barbers, hotel staff & tour guides to name a few.
But not flight attendants.
I did some research to find out why.
Some argue that a flight attendant’s role is primarily one of passenger safety not service: we don’t tip police officers or firefighters either.
I find this explanation a little dubious: yes a flight attendant’s primarily role is to ensure passengers complete the trip safely but so is a cab driver’s…
Others argue that, until recently anyway, passengers did not exchange cash with flight attendants and therefore no one tipped them.
Again, dubious: you rarely if ever buy a tour ticket from the guide yet giving the guide a tip for a job well done is an accepted practice.
The most plausible answer, to me at least, is that the original role of flight attendants was one of medical safety (all flight attendants had to be nurses in the early days of commercial flight). No one tips doctors and nurses and the “tradition” has held to this day even though the nurse requirement was relaxed during World War II and eventually done away with. [1]
The “Freakanomics” blog on the New York Times site did an article on this issue a couple of years ago, just posing the question, and the comments are interesting. Go here:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/why-dont-flight-attendants-get-tipped/
But no one really seems to know why we don’t tip flight attendants.
I ended up tipping the flight attendant on the Southwest flight.
It wasn’t her first tip.
Maybe cultural norms are changing.
