Flight Attendant Asks Frontier Airlines Passenger To Tip For Coffee

A Frontier Airlines passenger says a flight attendant asked them to select a tip when buying a coffee on board. Frontier cabin crew have been asking for tips on the payment tablet for a decade. At first tips were pooled. Now it’s ‘eat what you kill’ with cabin crew entitled to whatever amounts they can collect from passengers. FA’s asking for tips now by u/Extreme_Wallaby_6069 in frontierairlines Frontier added tipping to its onboard payment tablets in the fall of 2015. I wrote last year about a passenger who was offered tip amounts starting at 18% after buying a beer and snacks. But flight attendants can skip the tip screen, and most of them seem to. One Frontier flight attendant says the request is awkward (I guess the usual “it’s just going to ask you a question,” cringe). They don’t expect a Frontier Airlines passenger who booked the lowest fare in the United States to tip. Passengers who want to give them something usually slip them a $5 bill. Frontier FA here… Tipping has always been an option on our FlyTab. Majority of our FAs don’t do it though because it’s extremely awkward, especially on the plane. That crewmember also says they respect colleagues who do show the screen: starting pay is low, and they believe Frontier should pay flight attendants more. Another crewmember says they receive $150 to $250 a month in tips. Frontier uses this to keep its costs low. (This is an airline that’s done flight attendant training at a truck stop in Wyoming, because it’s cheaper than doing it at Denver headquarters.) Flight attendants learn what their actual pay is, from the airline and passengers combined. The more passengers pay directly, the better they can retain crew despite low wages. Frontier’s contract starts pay at $25.50 per flight hour. A first-year flight attendant on reserve is generally guaranteed 75 hours of pay for a bid period, and that works out to about $23,000 a year. I recently looked at a 16-hour Frontier duty day where the flight attendant’s calculation understated her pay, but the corrected amount was still low. Frontier has moved toward more out-and-back flying, so many crew members return to base at night instead of spending several days on the road. Some like sleeping at home. Others who commute to their base have to make that trip more often, and they receive less per diem because they spend less time away. That’s their expense allowance, but frugal flight attendants can get by on less and pocket the difference. When Frontier introduced tablet tipping, the money was pooled among the flight attendants on each flight. In 2019 the airline changed so each flight attendant would keep the tips from their own sales. Their union adopted a policy in 2016 opposing any attempt to replace hourly wages with tips, while saying tips earned on top of contractual wages were acceptable. In 2019, union president Sara Nelson opposed the Frontier program itself, arguing that compensation for a safety job shouldn’t depend on customer tips. I looked at what flight attendants thought when this first became a big story. Some wanted the extra money. Others worried that a tipping culture would turn a safety role into a tipped service job, or give the airline room to offer lower wages than it otherwise would. Some passengers in the discussion say they’re happy to tip a friendly flight attendant. Others say Frontier should pay its own employees and that tipping for a cup of coffee has gone too far. Either way, the tip is optional. You can choose not to leave one. Frontier’s inflight menu includes coffee, snacks and alcoholic drinks. And one passenger had a question for the next stage of inflight service: What is an appropriate tip for an FA when they help me jump down an exit slide? Can I put it on my card? Will it count towards my mileage points? One reader blamed the request on the new federal tax treatment of tips, but Frontier’s screen was there a decade before that law. Another says their spouse’s coffee spilled because the lid wasn’t on all the way: “I think we should have gotten the tip!” Topics on this page