Work/life balance is a joke - Direct Sales Representative Viking Cruises Employee Review

2.0
26 Jan 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Work from home. Pay is great for top agents. Benefits are amazing at 100% company paid

Cons

They’ve increased how much PTO everyone gets over time, which on paper is amazing, right? Well, now let’s try and use that PTO for some time off. You’ll access a calendar that simply shows an open white space, meaning that there is available hours to take off, or the date has a red box around it indicating all available time off has been taken. Either way, you will submit your “request” for each day you’d like off one at a time. This means if you want to take a weeks long vacation that you’re planning several months from now, if it’s approved at all, it will happen sporadically, 1 day at a time. And you may get all the way up to that vacation week and guess what, that 1 Friday in the middle never gets approved. Sorry, we need the coverage on the phones. Once your request is submitted by the way, there’s no indication of where you may fall on the waitlist. Whether the calendar showed open, or all hours taken, you’ll just sit and hope that eventually whoever is back there approving request decides to grant you each day. How exactly then are we supposed to ever plan ahead? Book flights? Book vacation rentals etc. I have been with the company going on 8 years now and as much as I love the other aspects, I’m forced to consider other companies that value their employees work/life balance and provide more transparency around it because of this glaring omission of basic functionality and policy.

Explore other reviews about Viking Cruises

5.0
14 Feb 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good food on board, great team , pretty good beds only two person in the cabin, All the executives were really professional and good at their jobs and kind people.

Cons

It was a shame that anytime when there was a couple forming there was the possibility to be moved from your cabin and that happened quite often.

2.0
4 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The product is excellent, job is fully remote, provided equipment was excellent, and benefits package is top tier.

Cons

Training Was a Potemkin Village. The training experience and interviews presented a version of the job that bore little resemblance to the day-to-day reality once on the sales floor. Important details about compensation were not fully disclosed until after training, making it difficult to accurately evaluate the opportunity before investing significant time. The travel benefits that are heavily promoted during recruiting and training proved to be largely unattainable in practice. Getting vacation time approved or participating in familiarization trips was extremely difficult. The actual job consisted of constant outbound calling, relentless metric tracking, and micromanagement down to five-second increments between activities. Employees were closely monitored and frequently pressured regarding conversion metrics, including factors that were often outside their control. Scheduling can also be challenging. Most agents should expect non-consecutive days off, frequent late-night shifts, and regular weekend work. Schedule bids occur only twice per year and are heavily weighted toward tenure and production, giving long-tenured employees a significant advantage in obtaining desirable schedules. The management culture relied heavily on fear, write-ups, and threats of termination rather than coaching and development. Turnover was extraordinary. Roughly half of my training class was gone within the first month on the phones, and the vast majority had left before a year had passed.

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