Restaurant Clients’ Tipping Behavior and Its Stimulus on Hospitality’s Service Reliability in Kenya: A Food and Beverage Service Quality Approach

Abstract

Tipping is thought to have adverse negative effects on food service reliability within the global hospitality’s restaurant business. This is because of the general belief that tipping could be the origin of selective and discriminatory service, with an inclination toward clients who are believed to tip thus compromising service quality hence reliability. Therefore the purpose of this study was to establish the relationship between tipping and food service reliability in hospitality’s restaurant operations in Kenya. Descriptive research survey design was adopted while respondents constituted food service clients and managers, who were selected via simple random sampling as well as purposive sampling respectively, with a sample size of 384 respondents. The study established a statistical significant relationship between the IV – tipping and the DV – food service reliability (P ˂ 0.05), thus rejected the null hypothesis and concluded that there is a significant relationship between tipping and food service reliability.