Tipping Guidelines for Mt. Kilimanjaro Trek

Tipping is customary and highly expected at Kilimanjaro. This might come as a surprise to many, especially if coming from countries and cultures where tipping is not as prevalent or present at all. The amount of tip is also larger than others treks you might have been on perviously. This is because unlike most other treks around the world, trekking on Kilimanjaro requires a big crew. A group of 6 trekkers will have 23 members in the support staff, consisting of senior guide, assistant guides, cooks and porters.

Why should I tip?

At Monkey Adventures, our crew are paid above the minimum wages. However, to sustain a fair quality of life, Kilimanjaro crew need your generosity to keep on delivering outstanding service. The tipping system in the East African service industry follows the American-style. In essence, a tip is not merely a reward for exceptionally attentive service or hard work, but rather a highly anticipated payment intended to bridge the gap between the modest wages received by crew vs ever increasing cost of living in cities and towns of East Africa.

We request clients to budget for tips as part of total Kilimanjaro climbing tour expenses in addition to your climb costs, travel costs, gear rental costs as required for the expedition.

Why is tipping not included in the price?

Tipping is a very cultural thing on Kilimanjaro. The tradition of tipping has evolved over the last two decades to it's current state. There are some strong reasons why we cannot go against the custom and include tips in the prices.

(1) We pay more than minimum daily wages to our crew. But beyond a point, the crew strongly prefers to receive their income in the form of tips over salary because they can take home more legally if they receive the payment as tips instead of salary. The following is paragraph 4.11 from the Tanzania Revenue Authority's Income Tax Practice Notes:

"Employees in certain trades receive tips which form a substantial part to their income. The payments of tips received from the employer or a third party as a reward for services rendered in the course of the employment are taxable. Payments given as a present in appreciation of the recipients’ personal qualities, such as faithfulness, and consistency and readiness to oblige, would not be taxable."

In addition to income tax, there will be additional deductions and any amount paid to businesses in Tanzania is subject to 18% VAT.

So to give an idea, if you wish to pay USD 300 as tips to the crew they will take the entire amount home. For us to pay the same amount as take home salary to the crew, we will have to charge you over USD 500 as VAT of 18%, income tax, NSSF (20%), WCF, accounting charges will be deducted from what you pay before the crew can take the remaining amount home.

(2) Given how price competitive the market is, it is not within our capacity to go against the tipping customs that are followed by 99.9% of operators and increase our prices to account for tipping and associated taxes and costs and still attract business. If we do go against the universal practise of tipping on Kilimanjaro and increase our prices drastically to do away with tipping, our bookings will go down and will result in reduced quantity of work and reduced salary for everyone in the company which is not something our crew would welcome.

(3) Tips play a crucial role in optimizing the team's service delivery. By linking the crew performance directly to the incentives they make, tips act as a safeguard against complacency. Fixed salary is not as motivating as a rewards based one.

Can I prepay the tips?

Unfortunately this is not possible at the moment.

Even if it were possible, please note that around 50% of what you pay might be deducted from what crew receives because of various taxes and costs associated, if the tour operators are involved in the process. So we prefer not to get involved in the tipping process.

Should I tip even if I didn't reach the summit

The crew dates are blocked for your entire planned trek when you start the trek so we suggest you to plan for tips accordingly. Often the reason for clients failing to summit is AMS which is not related to quality of service delivered by crew. The decision on how much should you tip on Kilimanjaro should not depend on whether you have reached the summit or not but how well the Kilimanjaro guides and crew served you.

But in case you feel you haven't received good service from our crew, we don't want you to feel obliged to follow the tipping guidelines and can tip whatever you think is fair. But do share the feedback with us in such cases so we understand what went wrong and can prepare ourselves better for future.

Can I tip higher or lower than the suggested amount?

If you think the service was exceptional, we suggest you to tip upto the maximum amount indicated in the guidelines. We generally advice not to tip significantly above the higher end of recommended guideline because overtipping can lead to crews starting to depend on unsustainable tips and having unrealstic tipping expectations in their future tours.

If you think the service was good, we suggest you to tip as per guidelines.

Lastly if you think the service did not meet your expectations, please feel free to tip whatever you think was fair for the service delivered by your crew. Kindly share detailed feedback on where the crew failed to meet your expectations so we can analyse and work on addressing the shortcomings.

Our tipping guidelines

Although larger tips are always appreciated by our staff, they will be extremely grateful if you follow the guidelines for tipping given below. These amounts given below are for the whole group. For e.g, the whole group tips USD 15 to the cook per day. So these costs will be divided amongst the whole group.

• Senior guide : $20 – 25 per day from the whole group
• Assistant guide : $15 – 20 per day from the whole group
• Cook : $12 – 15 per day from the whole group
• Waiter : $10 – 12 per day from the whole group
• Porter : $8 – 10 per day from the whole group
• Summit porter : $12 – 15 per day from the whole group
• Toilet crew : $10 – 12 per day from the whole group

Crew for various group sizes

To calculate tips, it's important to understand how large your support team is going to be. Below we have listed the crew size from Group of 1 to 10.

• Group of 1 - 1 Senior Guide, 1 Cook, 3 or 4 Porters
• Group of 2 - 1 Senior Guide, 1 Assistant Guide, 1 Cook, 7 Porters
• Group of 3 - 1 Senior Guide, 1 Assistant Guide, 1 Cook, 9 Porters
• Group of 4 - 1 Senior Guide, 1 Assistant Guide, 1 Cook and 12 Porters
• Group of 5 - 1 Senior Guide, 2 Assistant Guides, 1 Cook and 15 Porters
• Group of 6 - 1 Senior Guide, 2 Assistant Guides, 2 Cooks and 18 Porters
• Group of 7 - 1 Senior Guide, 2 Assistant Guides, 2 Cooks and 21 Porters
• Group of 8 - 1 Senior Guide, 3 Assistant Guides, 2 Cooks and 24 Porters
• Group of 9 - 1 Senior Guide, 3 Assistant Guides, 2 Cooks and 27 Porters
• Group of 10 - 1 Senior Guide, 3 Assistant Guides, 2 Cooks and 30 Porters

How to give tips to the crew?

The best way would be to collect the tips from the whole group, and then divide it amongst the whole crew. Tips can be placed in individual envelopes and the climbers can hand them directly to each crew member. You can also prepare two envelopes. One for the guide, assistant guides and cooks. You can hand this envelope to the lead guide. The other envelope is for the porters. You can hand this over to the porters representative.

Expected tip amounts per client for some common routes and group sizes.

To help you calculate, here are the tip amounts broken down for each crew member