Vantaggi
Great for young people who are looking to travel the world and who don't have too much ambition to further their careers. Base salary to pretty good within the field. Good opportunities to work in other stores around the country if you want to relocate.
Svantaggi
For some time now this company has been sliding rapidly down hill. Firstly, the back of house departments are woefully understaffed, even though they continue to open 2+ stores each year, which they are struggling to fill. The most basic requests have to go through 2 or 3 layers of bureaucracy before getting a simple question answered, which is apparently lightening the load and streamlining the company. This doesn't really show to the customer due to the top level sales staff that they have working for them. Secondly, this ever increasing amounts of work they are expected to do is leading to them haemorrhaging the best and most experienced staff they have. They are being replaced by new and younger staff which is really getting away from the experienced staff that Trailfinders have built their reputation on. The bonus targets have increased by 40-50% over the last few years therefore making it more and more difficult for staff to hit the same pay outs. The amount of money they make from each booking is the same so the senior management team have decided just to make it harder for regular sales staff to hit targets, and just expect them to work harder by 40-50%. They regularly send figures out internally stating that they are paying out record amounts, this is probably true but they haven't mentioned in this that they have decided to pay the top sellers a higher percentage than the rest of the sales team whilst directing the best and most lucrative sales leads towards the higher sellers, also with taking as many young sales staff as they can this is also misleads the figures as they have more people and more stores than they did last year. Trailfinders pride themselves on never appointing anyone higher than sales consultants from outside the company. This sounds wonderful but in the cold light of day it means that the pool of people to get managers and supervisors from is so small, all you end up with are massively under-qualified people in higher positions who would never have got passed the written application if it was advertised externally. Because of this all you get from any management is the same company line that they have been told to pull. The lack of communication back up the ranks is non-existent and with the lack of any HR team it means you are on your own and they have a "like it or leave" mentality which is why at the moment lots of staff are choosing the later option. The working day is 8hrs and they have decided to add on 1hr compulsory overtime, so a 9hr working day with a 30min break for lunch and that is policed with the upmost intensity. The hours worked on a Sunday are questionable, I don’t know how they have managed to keep shops open passed every other one on the high street, even beyond Sunday trading hours. Not even when it is advised by the government for the shops to shut and give their tired staff a few hours off on a Sunday, they have opted to flaunt these trading laws and flog their staff even more. The fact that Trailfinders are expecting to sell tailor made trips (not really, their all just brochured tours which they convince the customer is a unique trip) but they are expected to be put together either on one hone call or in 10mins admin time that you are allocated before management demanding you go back on the phones. If I were spending the amounts of money that Trailfinders are expecting people to pay I would want to consultant to even seem like they have put some effort in and though about it rather than just cobbling together another generic trip and if a client asks for something that they don't sell then there is no flexibility in trying to get rates. The only reason they have a remotely acceptable rating on here is that they pressure staff into writing 5* reviews on Glassdoor, I have been asked by 2 different managers in 2 different stores to write one.
