Pros
A good company for your first job if you're super young, and if you don't need money and are looking to make a lot of friends. Good training, because they are preparing you for levels of abuse you can't imagine. Nothing can prepare you for being in the call center at this company. There's a beer fridge open for a few hours on Thursdays and Fridays, which we desperately needed after the abusive phone calls all day, all week.
Cons
Cult-vibes: forced to smile, ride the office scooters, not each lunch alone, forced to participate in scavenger hunts, encouraged to scam parents. Pays less than minimum wage, even for bilinguals. You only get to travel for free as a Tour Guide, so in the Agent role and the TA role, you don't get to travel. Be careful; they pay you once a month but don't warn you. Sometimes they pay you late, and you can go 6-7 weeks without a paycheck. The tour contract and payment plan are confusing on purpose; you realize after a few weeks that it is a scam. Parents are required to sign it to book a tour, but then about 90% of parents end up paying huge late fees. If you don't pay your late fees, the child can't go on their trip AND you don't get the money back that was already paid towards the trip. They could very very easily make the contract and payment plan clear and easy to understand, but they don't on purpose. This is how the company makes money, it is their business model. The fees DON'T go to collections, and the Agent is able to waive ALL of the fees if they want to. The fees lead to a lot of negative calls, about 90% of calls are fights with parents. This takes a huge toll on the Agent, probably why the company encourages drinking from the beer fridge on Thursdays and Fridays. The parents are just regular (dumb) people who mostly have never traveled and don't understand how it works and are relying on a tour company to take care of the travel for their child, and then they get trapped with hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars in fees. It's exploitative. The parents threaten you, abuse you, scream/cuss at you, threaten to come to the office and find you, tell you terrible stories about their child being gang r*aped to gain sympathy/get fees waived, this is nonstop all day and all week. There's high turnover and a high rate of sick days and mental health days. Even if you don't normally call in sick, you will at this company, everyone does and it's an infectious mindset. Because of the high turnover (most people would just stop showing up) and a lot of sick people, there's a lot of work that falls on the remaining people. Lots of work + below minimum wage pay + constant verbal abuse and fighting = a terrible place to be. I wouldn't recommend anyone who is sensitive or with depression, anxiety or PTSD work here. Every single person on the Traveller Support Team cried at one point, some had to go home. Some never came back. There's no reason anyone should work here and go through that abuse for less than minimum wage; you can work at Starbucks for more money and less abuse. A lot of employees felt tricked by promises of travel and a cool Google-like place to work, and soon realized we have to endure insane amount of abuse for just $2300 a month.
