Complete Story
02/14/2020
Digital Tipping is Coming to a Hotel Near You
It’s the universal travel faux pas: You arrive at a hotel, receive your luggage from the bellboy, reach into your pockets, scour your wallet, and turn up ... nothing. Or, perhaps worse, a large-denomination bill you’re too embarrassed to ask them to break.
Bashar Wali, president of Provenance Hotels, lamented the sorry state of hotel tipping in a post on LinkedIn this past July, in which he argued around the idea of tipping as fair compensation, and that it’s more like an expression of gratitude, a "personal acknowledgment” to those who "are exposed to the worst parts of us [piles of dirty laundry, hangovers, room service leftovers] and get the least appreciation”.
An increasingly cashless society, digital checkout features, the mad dash to the airport-they all make tipping harder, but they aren’t good enough excuses.
The comments piled in. "If only there was an app for that ...” multiple people said.
Now there is. TipYo debuted on Apple’s App Store in November, promising to streamline the tipping experience for travellers everywhere. Except that right now, it’s only available at Wali’s Hotel Murano, in Tacoma, Washington, where it’s been in a soft launch. (An Android version is coming in the first quarter of this year.)
