Pros
For prospective employees, I’m not sure there are any pros at the moment. It used to be a great place to work/learn and meet really driven and talented colleagues. At my time of leaving, morale was so low I’m not sure someone new would find any benefit.
Cons
For a nonprofit, they’ve strayed far from being mission-driven and are now entirely focused on PR hits rather than actually creating meaningful campaigns that generate tourism interest. Employees aren’t trusted in their respective fields and are instead expected to go through leaps and bounds to make a select group of the least hard-working individuals at the organization seem like they’re the ones worthy of praise. Decisions come at the last minute and disrupt any progress one could make at standardizing their responsibilities.
I spent a good chunk of my last year there envisioning how great of a place it would be to work if the board saw through the hollow leadership, cleaned house at the executive level, and started fresh. It is truly a free for all for those that make the big bucks and everyone else has to follow suit, no matter how much sanity or integrity you lose along the way.
While Visit Philly may still have a positive external reputation, these reviews make it clear it’s only a matter of time before the dam breaks and the hard work of the many individuals who laid the foundation (and tried to salvage the organization) will be overtaken by the failures of those select few.