Vantaggi
Great co-workers with diverse backgrounds and extensive travel experience, opportunities to travel (approximately once per year) to lesser visited areas of the world, decent salary for the travel industry.
Svantaggi
Workload distribution: There is a huge variance in the amount of work distributed to employees. If you prove yourself to be a quick learner, detail oriented, and able to juggle a demanding workload, you will be saddled with even more work, which essentially sets you up for failure. This is particularly true if you work in the OTBP/catalog tours department, which is sorely understaffed and receives no assistance from the department’s management. Expect to skip lunches, come in early, or stay late during the high season (all unpaid). If you are unable to get your work done within your allotted hours, then it is assumed you have problems with time management (rather than the extensive workload being the issue). At times, department management will advise you to come in early or shave time off of your lunch hour, which is highly illegal as we are non-exempt employees. Management: Company management is incredibly secretive; there is a huge lack of transparency in all aspects of the business, from simple programming decisions to financial metrics. At times, management's only concern is that you are keeping your seat warm from 8:30am - 5:30pm. If you work in the OTBP department, your comings and goings will be monitored, and if you happen to be 5 minutes late for work, or coming back from lunch, this will be notated in a spreadsheet or Word document and you'll receive a sternly-worded email from department management, whose main role is to serve as an incredibly expensive punch card time clock. In addition, department management, simply put, fails to pull its own weight when it comes to workload. As you are drowning in work, zero assistance is offered; instead department management concerns itself with surfing the internet when not attending to its Orwellian tasks. Lack of upward mobility: There is zero chance of upward mobility within the company. Office environment: Get a better office – the employees don’t like working in a grimy, freezing (during the winter) or hot, stuffy (during the summer) office while dealing with clients who are spending thousands upon thousands of dollars per trip. Furthermore, it is embarrassing when clients actually come to the office to meet with sales staff or tour specialists! Morale: Incredibly low employee morale; some of the lowest I have seen of any organization.