NOTE: I have stopped working on this project and let its domain expire. May shoulditip.in rest in peace ⚰️
This is the complete code for http://shoulditip.in/—a simple website to help people work out whether or not they're meant to tip in the country they find theirselves in.
I travel quite a lot, and, as an Australian, tipping is a total foreign concept to me. As a result, 'should i tip in [country]' is a common item in my search history.
My intention is that someone in a bind can very quickly Google 'should i tip in mexico', find http://shoulditip.in/mexico/ and have a straightforward (albeit, not totally nuanced) answer in seconds.
Obviously, tipping is an incredibly elaborate social custom and cannot possibly be neatly summarised into six numbers. I aim only to give a quick, 'good enough', guide.
My aim is to populate the site by going through this World Bank list of countries by number of international tourists one by one, starting with the top 50.
For each country, I try to answer:
- Is tipping customary? (yes/no)
- How much (in local currency, USD or a %) should one tip:
- Waiters, i.e. someone serving you food
- Bartenders, i.e. someone serving you a beer
- Taxi drivers
- Luggage handlers, i.e. a porter at a hotel
- Housekeepers, i.e. cleaning staff at a hotel
- Tour guides, i.e. someone who guides you around, typically for a day
The website is just a Jekyll static site hosted with GitHub Pages. All country
data is located in the _countries directory—one markdown file per country.
If you can code, submit a Pull Request with corrected country data or data for
a country that we don't have added yet. Otherwise, simply create a new issue
describing what needs to be changed. In either case, try to provide links to
some other sites that back up the numbers that you've described.