Pros
There is so much potential for this company. It is one of the fastest growing privately owned cruise lines. The Ships are beautiful and luxurious. The cruise itineraries are good and there are many different ones to chose from the Caribbean, North Europe the Med. The cruises are nice and very affordable to everyone. The benefits and hours are good. The supervisors (few that there are) in the Fort Lauderdale office are caring and seem to really care about their employees. The customer service and reservations management is not very strict, and are very forgiving with mistakes. There are perks & fun things for Office Moral, & nice Christmas Parties. Also benefits of being able to take a cruise for yourself of family if you get time off, for a very low price and sometimes free. They are constantly changing, so this company can only get better, not worst. For the employees that wait, there will be rewards if they hang in there through the tough times in the office.
Cons
The NUMBER ONE COMPLAINT is their Booking System. Their computer system for Booking is outdated and prehistoric. The system crashs much of the time. (though they seemed to have just improved a little recently) . You'd think a company so big over all the world , would invest some of all of their money into a better computer booking system. Also they don't have enough people working on these type of IT problems. They should have 2 or 3 people in the US office for IT Problems alone. They only have 1 right now who is way overworked. Their promotions don't work half the time & cruises that seem available are not able to be booked because the system is so bad. The discounts that are given for the loyalty program do not stay on the bookings. The USA website should have more information on it. They have 12 ships & probably 2 more comming soon, they need to put more information that is commonly asked on the website, so there would be less calls into the call center & less mistakes in non-uniformal information being given out by different reps who answer the phones. Also their website is very user unfriendly many of the guests say, so many complaints about it. More money should be invested in their website. They should be able to keep up with Royal Caribbean, Princess, Carnival & some of the other competition in the US as far as websites are concerned. This is frustrating when customer service and reservations have to take these calls and there is no technical help for guest or agents for online services. There should be more money invested in Spanish speaking & French speaking Reservationists and Customer Services and the Answering Service that is Automated. There should be a Telephone LIne Automated that says "En Espanol" or " Francios" or English, for North America. Bi-Lingual Customer Service & Reservationists should be paid more for being bi-lingual. Reservationists & customer service in the call center do not make enough money. They should be making on average $2.00 an hour higher, compared to the rest of the US Market for jobs in Customer Service. There should be more Supervisors on the floor of the Call center so the few that they have are not so stressed working overtime with all the problems that they have. The supervisors for this department are overstressed, overworked and underpaid. (Yet through all manage to keep their cools). There are so many problems with the system, the Promos, and also that the main control is in Italy. The US office has to ask permission with things to do with bookings. For instance Italy can go in the inventory and take a cabin that the US already has a hold on for a customer,,and give us a different one, and it is just too bad for the US and their guest, sometimes they are compensated somehow, but many times not. Because of the Website & the Booking System being so bad, there are tons of calls generated, making the Reservations lines all blown up & patrons holding for over 30 minutes in peak seasons. All the information that the new reservationists are learning is not the same as the ones who have been here awhile. The same answer is not being given to agents and guests over the phone lines. Also, all of their departments should take phone calls, For Air, Transfers, Hotels and Excursions; their should be a live telephone person to answer questions & a department of not just 1 person doing it all. The Transfer/Air Department should not have to be requested by Emails only, this is prehistoric! It should be able to be added on in that department on the spot or in Reservations. The Accounting Department doesn't take phone calls either and they should. Reservations department cannot be expected to know everything about every depaartment. Because some of these other departments dont take phone calls, to answer questions & speak with the public, all of this falls on the Reservationist, which is also very stressful. The reservationists have to send emails to everyone, about everything, which would not take up so much of their time, (which they need to answer more calls) but are too busy writting emails to the departments that wont answer phone calls. Their accounting department needs a few more people in there, they are also overworked and underpaid. Money is very important to this large of a company, so why not invest in a bigger accounting department. They are very lacking here.