Pragmatic restaurant tipping in star-rated hotels in Kenya

Abstract

Tipping can be traced to Tudor England in the sixteenth century. This act transformed into a custom, spreading to many countries. However, tipping is observed differently from one country to the other and thus is not homogeneous from a global perspective. The act of tipping is thought to be motivated by various predictors, which were studied and are thought to influence peoples’ tipping behaviour. They include gender, income level, religion, nationality, hospitality exposure, alcohol consumption and the weather conditions of the day. The study applied a cross-sectional survey design and was carried out in Kenya during from December 2019 to February 2020 in eight star-rated hotels. A questionnaire was applied in this study. The study has results showing that data is distributed close to the mean values. Further, the study results show that the independent variable explains 78.4% of the variability in the tipping practice. Thus the variable of “Patronage frequency” gave the strongest significant and unique contribution in explaining the dependent variable (B = 0.515, Sig. = 0.000, t = 15.363). However, religion gave the weakest unique and non-significant contribution (B = 0.013, Sig. = 0.770, t = 0.293). For hotel restaurants to achieve high levels of tipping, there is a need to adjust these predictors depending on the effect of each on the outcome variable. Thus, the study established a significant relationship between the determinants of tipping and the tipping practices in the sampled star-rated hotels in Kenya.