Why should your hotels use a POS with digital tipping solutions?

A POS with digital tipping capitalizes on the ease and flexibility of digital payments while making it easier for guests to leave tips when they are satisfied with the service. Contactless payments are becoming the norm and hotels must have the infrastructure in place in order to facilitate easy payments across the entire payment journey. 

Digitizing tips make it easier for hotels to manage and distribute them across employees, as well as incentivizing guests to leave them by making it easier and more streamlined for guests to do so. In this article, we’ll look at what digital tipping solutions are and what are the benefits for hotels.

What are digital tipping solutions?

A digital tipping solution is a capability enabled by your POS software to not only digitally pay out your employees, but also to facilitate the digital receipt of tips from guests. There are two ways this can be done, either by providing a QR code that is scannable should guests want to leave a tip or by using your POS to enable this. 

Digital tipping with front-face display POS

When you use your hotel restaurant POS to facilitate tipping, you can allow guests to manually input their gratuity by using a POS with a front-facing display, giving them control of the payment experience, and allowing for a final chance for your staff to make a lasting impression as guests finalize payment. 

Using the POS to facilitate tips

Some POS allow guests to provide cash payments, but the norm is for employees to use a mobile POS whether it be a mobile terminal, smartphone or tablet to help with accepting payment. Guests can then write on the receipt the added amount and then employees manually input the gratuities at the end of the service based on the amount on the receipt and then get paid out at the end of the week or payment cycle. 

Or another option is for the POS to offer the ability to add in an extra percentage directly at the time of payment and then depending on how your hotel manages payroll, employees will be credited weekly, at the end of their shift, or monthly.

What are the benefits of digital tipping solutions for hotels?

There are many benefits of implementing a digital solution for tips at hotels. Let’s look at some of them in more detail. 

Increase employee satisfaction

In a high turnover industry like hospitality, it’s important to have measures in place to increase employee retention, and implementing digital tipping is a great way to do so. This gives employees an incentive to provide excellent service because they know they will have the appropriate retribution. 

Discover more ways to improve employee satisfaction.

More reliable and fair

Digitizing tips inspires trust amongst employees because it is a more reliable way of keeping track of them and ensuring the money doesn’t get pocketed. This way they can be more evenly distributed amongst colleagues and there is no disputing whether the tips were received because there is a digital trail.

It’s cashless

Nowadays, many people don’t carry cash so by enabling your POS to accept tips, you ensure that guests can leave cashless tips. No longer do guests have the excuse of not having cash; by using your POS to accept tips, guests can use any payment method to leave gratuities including for departments like housekeeping and the bellhop who traditionally don’t have a POS. 

You can accept gratuities through a QR code or at payment terminals throughout the hotel facilities. The best part is that guests can choose their payment method of choice without having to carry cash on them.

Read more about cashless hotels.

Decrease manual work

With the help of an integrated POS you can take out the manual processing and distribution of tips because you can collect and pay out gratuities all with the same system. This also means less chance for error or for miscalculated tips because there is a close record of the gratuities that were received, and you can cross-check this with the employee scheduling, so you know who to distribute the gratuities to. Learn more about the benefits of payment automation.

Increased tipping

When there is an easy protocol around processing and receiving tips, this means that it is also easier for employees to encourage tipping. For example, when you have a front-facing POS you are in close contact with the guest when they are asked how much to tip – this creates an incentive for them to do so. You can even suggest different percentages, i.e. 10%, 15% and 20%, and it’s likely guests will go for the mid-range. 

Not only are there greater chances that a guest will actually leave a tip, but also the actual amount they leave may be greater because they aren’t limited by the amount of cash they carry in their wallet. 

It’s easy

Ease is one of the main benefits of using a POS to manage the process. This means that you can keep track of gratuities with your POS instead of manually. Then you can distribute gratuities accordingly at payroll or at the end of shifts. It’s also an easier way of understanding who are your top performing employees because you can get reports showing who received the most gratuities in any given period.

Streamlined payment journey

Contactless payments are the wave of the future, and with tips being an integral part of payments at a hotel, it’s important that the whole payment journey be streamlined from purchasing in-hotel services to tipping for great service. This facilitates ease of payments and the easier this process is, the more likely employees are to be tipped for their stellar service.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve looked at digital tipping solutions and the benefits of implementing a POS to accept tips. Some of these benefits include: decreased manual work, an increase in frequency, and the fact that it’s cashless, more reliable, and provides increased employee satisfaction. By ensuring that there’s an easy system in place to give tips, it’s also more likely that guests will be inclined to do so. 

This system of reward encourages employees to be the best they can be because they know they will be compensated accordingly, and happy employees are key for employee retention and for delivering a top guest experience.