P&O Cruises announced last week that it is ending the mandatory daily service charges effective May 2019, according to the Express newspaper in London.

Cruise passengers seem to have welcomed the news, thinking that the change will make cruises cheaper for them.

The majority of cruise passengers in the British market seem to have resented the mandatory charges, stating that they always remove the charges and, allegedly, decide who and how much to tip.  Many correctly view the mandatory charges as an effort by the cruise line to require passengers subsidize the meager wages paid to crew members or, worse, to divert the tips as profits for the company.

Many crew members state that passengers who stand in line to remove the service charges rarely tip at the end of the cruise.

Several years ago I posted photographs of pages and pages of documents showing that passengers routinely remove automatic gratuities from their sail and sign accounts. A crew member sent me the photos of the removed gratuities. Read: Carnival Hikes Pre-Paid Gratuties But Will Passengers Secretly Remove Tips?

There appears to be a significant difference between British based cruise lines and U.S. based cruise lines like Carnival, NCL and Royal Caribbean. These cruise line routinely gouge their customers with high auto-gratuities which many believe are pocketed by the companies to increase profits.

Cruise passengers may like the news of no more auto-tips on P&O Cruises because they can keep money in their pockets (and out of the pockets of the cruise lines), but what about the hard-working crew members?

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