My wife, myself and our three children (ages 24, 17, 13) plan on touring Europe very soon. What should I expect to tip the tour guide, driver, etc. I know that local guides would be tipped separately at the time of service, but what of the Tour Leader/Driver/etc. Should I wait until the end of the Tour and then give him/them a lump sum; or what would be the proper method?

Thanks for any information you can offer!!

. .

The reccomended guidelines on tipping on a daily per person basis is as follows.

$4.00 per day for the tour Director.

$2.50 per day for the coach driver.

$1.00 per day for local guides.

They have to do an outstanding job to get this. Tip more or less based on your experience with them.

Max is accurate on most of that however for the local guides,if good,we usually tip 1 euro not 1 usd. We never use the USD in Europe as the recepient than has to go change the money at a bank or ??

On our recent trip to Eastern Europe, only two of the twelve countries we visited were on the Euro. When we offered a choice to the local guides of a US dollar or the equivalent in their currency, they preferred the US dollar.

From the cruisecritic message board.

QUOTE:

"Gypsylady,

Great to hear that you enjoyed your cruise!!

No, since we got the EURO there aren´t many places accepting anything else. I remember days when at very touristy spots all vendors had prices listed in Deutsch Mark, Italian Lira, Austrian Schilling, USD. Some McDonalds and Burger Kings are still accepting USD but the exchange rate is very poor. Due to the weak USD there´s no one interested in being paid in USD over here.

steamboats"

End QUOTE


This is a quote from another travel board. I think it explains why we should not tip in USD. Nobody wants our worthless USD. By the time they would go to a bank and exchange it there is nothing left!!The author of the above post is a freqent poster on cruisecritic and lives in Munich Germany.Come on now, would you want tips of currency from another country here in the US??? Of course NOT!!! We are guests in thieir country. Let's try NOT to be an "ugly American"

There are countless ways to be an "ugly American" and on our trips to Europe we have seen a lot of them. We were even guilty of a few including tipping in US dollars in Italy and Austria.

Yep! That's ugly!

The tipping guidelines are just that, guidelines and tipping is a personal thing. If you felt like your tour director deserves one, tip them.
My tour director found out that I was a huge baseball fan and was dying that I was missing my Colorado Rockies games and scores during their amazing run to the World Series (I was on my trip from the middle to the end of October and missed the NLCS and the World Series). . He would always keep me updated on the scores, since my cellphone didn't work over there and the news over in the UK didn't care about American baseball, and even would save bits from the newspaper for me if there was anything printed about the games. He didn't have to do that for me.
Our driver was very personable and would often give little tidbits of information about a trip if we were chatting with him while stopped someplace.

The tour director that goes the extra mile gets the extra tip. If the coach driver provides cold bottled water on the coach he also gets the extra tip.