Pros
Good opportunity if you'd like to work in the tourism field obviously, get to be involved with many different projects and make connections in the industry. Before the Pandemic layoffs there was a good core group of people outside of management that had fun working together.
Cons
Quite simply, it starts at the top. Under the founding CEO's leadership, like any company we had our issues. But when the new CEO took over in 2018, there was an immediate and noticeable divestment in the general staff's professional development and appreciation. This ranged from converting the office to an early 2000s-fad open plan layout with tiny workspaces, to not allowing anyone below the executive level access to the industry conferences they had once enjoyed. This was matched by the creation of a "C-suite", with 7 (later 8) c-level titles for an organization of around 60 people, who then exclusively enjoyed the perks all staff had once had access to, often staying at the fanciest hotels in the process. They also relied more and more on external agencies for work, ignoring the staff in house, preferring to hold agencies accountable instead of investing in the careers of the people under them. Their commitment to diversity is also a joke, where nothing but indifference was shown to certain diverse members of staff, preferring to make media appearances feigning a care for diversity the priority. This was further exacerbated by the recreation of 6 Vice President level positions, where no people of color were elevated to these titles. For some it was well deserved based on their time at Visit Philly, others were new staff members seemingly riding the wave of nepotism. When the pandemic hit and layoffs became inevitable, unfortunately all the random big no-return projects in the last year (like Podcasts) left the org financially incapable of holding onto many good people - preferring instead to seemingly preserve exec salaries and cut lower level staff (many felt from an exec team who would constantly and loudly announce all the things they "did" for the company, not announcing they had taken cuts seemed pretty suspect). A lot of dedicated and talented people were lost, and those that remained were subjected to a “be grateful” culture and (as one previous review alluded to) unintelligible rants from the CEO.