Viking Cruises Reviews

Pros

Incredible growth opportunity, the best benefits, amazing product, company cares about every employee, wonderful travel benefits, great work environment

Cons

Still feeling growing pains regarding systems

Pros

Great product, people you work with, office complex.

Cons

Middle Management, unrealistic sales quotas

Pros

Great sales team. The supervisors and most of the service leads are good people. That's where it ends.

Cons

From an organizational standpoint, the company is a mess. Departments are siloed to the point that effective communication across channels is unachievable. Furthermore, middle management is mostly comprised of individuals promoted beyond their capabilities, and lack effective communication skills to begin with. Specifically in the reservations department, managers are the most unpleasant, impersonal people I've ever worked with in my professional life. You'll read plenty of other negative reviews below this one speaking to the micromanagement, frequent and tedious policy changes, and unreasonable sales goals, and that's all true, but just they way in which management interacts with the people under them is deplorable. Never mind the fact their leadership doesn't instill confidence in or empower their employees - they lack even the most basic people skills. High turnover rates are common in all call center environments, but the rate at people come and go from this place should be the first and only red flag you need to tell you all you need to know. If you're interested in the day-to-day nonsense that goes on, read the other reviews; there's only so many different ways to say the same thing. I myself read many negative reviews on this very website before my interview, and chalked them up to disgruntled, unsuccessful sales people bitter that they weren't making the money they thought they would - that was a grave mistake. There are a plenty of talented, intelligent people who work in sales here, and they're just as miserable as the lowest guy on the roster. I assure you, most if not all of the positive reviews here are posted by management or by someone directed to do so by management. Don't make the same mistake I did. Listen to your gut and apply for positions elsewhere. I don't blame the company for the current upheaval in the travel industry - quite the opposite, actually. Viking, to their credit, did an admirable job taking care of their customers in offering refunds and 125% vouchers for cancelled cruises, even going so far as to return monies paid for insurance. No one can say Viking doesn't care about their guests - but, this is a forum for employee reviews, not guest reviews, and the way the company treats their workers is an entirely different matter. What prompted me to write this review isn't the fact we're making less money during the travel ban -- again, I don't blame Viking for that and it'd be asinine of me to do so -- it's that they've effectually stopped paying us. Sales people make about $16 an hour, barely minimum wage, and that's simply not enough to cover our cost of living. And, given that the vast majority of all new bookings made right now are by customers looking to use vouchers they received from their cancelled trips to reschedule for future sailings, right now there's no new revenue to be made. And given that our commission plan is revenue-based, there's no way to make commission. You'd think management would find a way to restructure our commission plan to compensate for this, especially since we're the ones working the hardest right now to keep the company afloat. We're tasked with trying to convince guests when they call in asking for their money back to instead accept the company's voucher offering so Viking can keep all those funds on the books. They call us the "Save" team now, that's the idea - we're saving the company. But they refuse to address our compensation at all. In fact, they didn't even have the decency to tell us they weren't going to be changing anything until after the April pay period had already ended. They're daring us to quit, knowing that most are too afraid to risk unemployment during this time of uncertainty. Meanwhile, managers, sales coaches, training managers and other salaried employees aren't effected by this at all. it's just the sales agents bearing the financial brunt of the situation, while being asked (coerced) to do more work. I'm not looking for anyone to cover my losses, I'm merely trying to pay my bills and feed my family. Nobody expects to make six figures right now, we just want something, anything, to live on. It'd be one thing if it had taken them a month or so to figure something out for us, but it's now been four since this happened and they're content to leave things as they are. Working here has always been difficult. There's no company culture, management is abrasive, and the hours make a work-life balance impossible. But since the quarantine, it's gone too far. Anyone not seeking alternative employment right now as we speak is doing themselves a great disservice, or probably hasn't figured out yet that other industries are hiring.

Pros

They kept us employed during quarentine.

Cons

They don't tell us how they've altered our conversion plan until AFTER the pay period is over. They haven't even acknowledged the stress this is putting on their employees. I'd love to know how this is legal. If you think it's perfectly fine for a company to not tell employees how they're getting paid - DURING QUARENTINE - until the day before checks end up in their accounts, you'll love all the other fun policies this company pulls on its employees.

Pros

-Can be quite lucrative ($100k+ if you're good). -Health benefits are incredible. -The people you work with can be a treat. Some of the supervisors are excellent, some of the trainers are also excellent, and a pleasure to work with. -The product is excellent

Cons

A company run by either idiots, heartless people, or heartless idiots. 1. Marketing uses a spray-and-pray marketing scheme, and the verbiage of the promotions can be misleading. (See: "My Pillow" buy-one-get-one scandal.) We constantly receive calls from guests who see "2-for-1 deposit" and think that we've reverted back to our old and misleading marketing of 2-for-1 cruise fares. They may also see prices like $299 on social media and think that this means cruise fare, not domestic airfare promotions. This is partially their fault for not reading correctly, but having seen some of the advertisements, I'd like to give them at least a little credit. Marketing here is garbage. 2. The company is run by people who have little to no understanding of basic numbers and statistics. They recently just raised the conversion goals by 5 percentage points, while not increasing base salary or maximum payout. In short: it's increasingly harder to make the same money you were making before, with no other benefits added whatsoever. They have also recently been focusing on outbound percentage, as well. While quality outbound calls may indeed lead to repeat bookings and business, that doesn't matter to the managers of Viking Cruises. They want quantity. This has led to a few agents either spamming numbers that they knew wouldn't pick up, or calling guests for random and BS reasons. These are things like "are you still receiving brochures?" and the like. (You can easily tell if they've received a brochure by looking in the archaic and useless CRM system that is used by the company.) If they would actually hire data analysts, they could improve performance and efficiency. If they have data analysts working at the company, they either don't listen to them, or the analysts are absolutely abysmal at their jobs. 3. The rules are constantly changing, and seemingly for petty or otherwise overblown reasons. The person who sends out these rule changes is absolutely awful at communication, and often writes in nonsensical and/or condescending ways. Nobody knows what is going on anymore, and the occasional call to the help desk can result in multiple different and conflicting answers. Clarification is always needed, and sometimes it results in having to give your guest bad news or compensating them for the bad information. The company loses, either way. 4. The most pressing and important thing right now is what is being done about the Coronavirus in relation to current employees: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. While the rest of the city is either encouraging or forcing its employees to work from home, Viking Cruises seems to have no consideration for their workforce. Not only are sales agents now making LESS than their customer service counterparts, but we don't have enough sales or revenue to make a decent paycheck. The base wage alone is NOT enough to survive on, neither in Boston nor in Los Angeles, where the company is based. On top of this, we are constantly bombarded with panicked, distraught, and irritated guests who take out all of their frustration on people who are making under $16 an hour. We are worth more than this, and we can do much better. There has been no word as to whether we are going to be working from home, as that is not something Viking has even really ever allowed, except for the occasional tenured agent who lives elsewhere. There has also been no word about what they are going to do to compensate us for this mess. We don't know if we're going to be able to pay our bills in the coming months. We don't know what happens when one of us gets sick and can't come to work because we weren't allowed to work from home. If you're looking at applying for a "lucrative and fun" job: DON'T.

Pros

Earn as much as you sell, based primarily on conversion. Enjoy feedback for sales and mgmt improvement.

Cons

Can be a lot of micro management when it comes to outbounding, conversion, off phone personal time and overall performance.