FROM SILICON VALLEY TO THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS

How the Nation’s Oldest Outdoor Club Became the First Adopter of Cashless Tipping

An interview with Emily Grubby,General Manager, Highland Center atthe Appalachian Mountain Club

By Elle Rustique, Founder & CEO,TipBrightly

It was the summer of 2019 when an email popped up in my inbox. “We’d like to implement a cashless system of tipping.” It was an inquiry from the HR department of oldest outdoor club in the country, Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC). A team from AMC wanted to enable their housekeeping and dining room crew to receive cashless tips by enabling guests to leave a tip using their mobile phone. I asked Emily Grubby, General Manager to share her experience introducing this new way of tipping and expressing appreciation to her guests and staff. It’s not often that one has the opportunity to be up and close with a customer. I enjoyed getting to know Emily through our exchanges and thrilled with what I learned.

Elle: So, tell us your story!

Emily: I started working for the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) at their Highland Center in New Hampshire in 2013 as a seasonal front desk employee. Since that time, I have held many different positions at the facility, most recently becoming the Highland Center General Manager in spring of 2020.

Elle: What makes AMC special?

Emily: The AMC is the oldest conservation organization in the nation. We lead environmental conservation and education initiatives from Washington DC to Maine. We believe that outdoor recreation is a prime inroad to ethical environmental stewardship, so we operate lodges, huts, camps, and cabins to serve as basecamps where folks can get outdoors. The Highland Center, where I work, is in the heart of New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest.

Elle: What do you like most about your role at Highland?

Emily: There are many things I love about my position at the Highland Center. Primarily, I enjoy providing our guests with the opportunity to explore, learn about, and build relationships with the natural world. At our facility, we encourage folks to ease into an organic way of life. We provide them with good company, an epic backdrop, and an invitation to experience the outdoors in a safe and meaningful way. The evolution that takes place during a guest’s stay is a joy to behold.

Elle: How’s it working out? Who are we helping?

Emily: At the Highland Center, our “lodge crew” is a cohort of temporary staff who opt to spend their season living and working with us in the mountains. This crew serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner to our guests and maintains the general housekeeping of guest rooms and common spaces.

Up until the fall of 2019, our guests were only able to leave cash tips for our lodge crew. Since we don’t have an ATM at the lodge, our crew’s tips were limited to the cash guests may have had on hand. It was always a sticking point for guests and staff alike.

Elle: Our mission is to help tipped workers recover tips. How is this working out?

Emily: In the fall of 2019, we signed on for a trial period with TipBrightly to assess what need there might be for a cashless tipping service. Since that time, cashless tips have grown to be almost 50% of all tips our crew receives and has added tremendous value to the work of our lodge crew. As a manager, I’ll say that the www.nhlra.com | 10

TipBrightly service is incredibly easy to use. At the end of each pay period, I work with our business office to distribute the tips we’ve received to our staff, and it shows up as a unique line item on their paycheck. It couldn’t be more straightforward.

Elle: How have guests responded to the service?

Emily: It is quite easy for the guests to use as well. TipBrightly generated unique QR codes for us, and we’ve placed them in each guest room and on each dining room table. We have a lot of returning guests season after season, year after year, and many have expressed gratitude for finally offering them a way to tip our staff. The QR code remains an unconventional means of tipping, so occasionally guests will ask for instructions, but once they are on the website, the process and the interface is simple and user-friendly.

Elle: Anything that one of your staff would like to add?

Emily: Dawn Lambert, Dining Room Shift Leader told me this: “I work in a location that isn't set up for traditional credit card tipping and TipBrightly has been a game changer for us. In a world where less and less people carry cash, having an opportunity to process tips electronically and receive them in our paycheck has been fantastic. It's great to know our hard work is appreciated by our customers.”

Elle: Have there been any benefits that you didn’t expect?

Emily: The fact is, the AMC is a non-profit organization. This allows us to do some really positive and meaningful work in the world, and it also means that our compensation structure isn’t the same as a for-profit hotel chain. TipBrightly has given us the opportunity, at a very low cost to the organization, to supplement the earnings of our incredible staff to reflect the top notch service they provide.

Elle: What is your prediction for the future of cashless tipping?

Emily: We were already trending toward a cashless world, but now, as the public has become more health conscious, the value of cashless transactions has increased tremendously. It’s evident simply in the amount of cashless tips our crew brings in now compared to one year ago. As I mentioned earlier, cashless tips make up nearly 50% of the tips our staff takes home. I envision that ratio only increasing.