Should We Be Tipping Flight Attendants?
The latest battle in the tipping wars has taken to the skies.
I'm typically a pretty militant advocate for tipping. Delivery? Tip. Coffee? Tip. Hotel service? Tip. Bartenders? Tip. The list goes on. For service industry positions without protections and living wages, tipping bridges an essential gap in the US. Because we live in a country where corporations have more protections than citizens, and triple the protections of its workers, the consumer bears the onus for ensuring a fair wage for service staff.
But where I cross the aisle is when it comes to tipping flight attendants. This is not because I don't think flight attendants aren't doing a great job—they are. It's not even because they have the greatest working conditions—some flight attendants still don't get paid until the plane doors close. It's because it's actually against most airlines' policies to tip flight attendants, and more importantly, the Association of Flight Attendants have stated pretty clearly that they are against the practice.
In a statement from 2019, the AFA said in a statement regarding the introduction of tipping flight attendants at Frontier Airlines: "Flight attendants are certified for our safety, health, and security work. Safety is not variable and therefore base compensation for a safety job cannot be variable. Tipping is not part of a flight Attendant's compensation for serving as aviation’s first responders."
Broadly, the AFA totally rejects the concept of tipping flight attendants. That's because their fight is the one outlined above: where workers are well compensated and protected in a way that does not require consumers to cover the cost of wages.
But like clockwork, there's a debate on who should be tipping and how much. Recently, it was a viral troll tweet about tipping first class flight attendants hundreds of dollars. It was quickly mocked by most people—but any tipping discourse tends to bring out bad faith arguments. If you scroll back on X (formerly Twitter), you can see that this was brought up for debate in 2023, 2019, 2018, even as far back as 2011.
And so, as another round of "should we tip flight attendants?" circulates the internet, a clear answer: No. Most airlines forbid the acceptance of any sort of monetary compensation, including gift cards. Instead, you can do something that is free: be kind and cooperative when you fly. And if you really want to go the extra mile? You can learn how to support the work of the AFA, which supports over 50,000 flight attendants.
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