AmaWaterways reviews

- Employee receive really bad pay for what managers expect from employees. Most employees start between $20-25 an hour, with an unpaid lunch break. The average schedule is around 8:00-5:00, and employees are required to be in the office 4 days a week. So while an employee may make $24 or $25 an hour, they are spending at least 4 hours unpaid hours in the office every week. This is less than the average server makes in LA, and significantly less than most people make in marketing, operations, and similar departments at other companies. - The structure to increase your pay is bad. Employees are paid hourly for the first three years of employment, receiving a ~3% pay increase every year. This does not even keep up with normal inflation, let alone the 8% rate we saw in 2022. After 3 years of full time employment, employees are bumped up to a salary position, where they make about $65,000 a year in most departments. They are also entitled to the 3% raise. So for new college graduates looking to join Ama in 2023, if everything goes well, they will be making around $70,000 in 2026, and much less than that in the interim. Or they could work elsewhere and make a lot more money. - It is also worth noting that at most departments in Ama, unlike other companies, one cannot earn certifications or attended leadership courses to increase their pay or standing. Promotions are rare. The people in power have been there for a long time, and it is not clear if they have marketable skills to go elsewhere. It seems the best bet for senior employees is to be allowed to work remotely elsewhere, or perhaps to visit places in Europe with some amount of frequency. - There is no reason for this company to require most employees to go into the office. Everything is communicated via Microsoft Teams, and most jobs are heavily email focused. While training, my trainer was not receptive to me visiting their desk, and checked all of my work on Teams. In some departments employees go into the office 5 days a week. This hurts morale. - Most departments are stretched thin. During my first week of employment, all lunch table discussions were surrounding the endless increases in responsibilities for employees. The longer employees have been at the company, the more responsibilities they have. As mentioned previously, the pay does not increase accordingly. - The training structure is genuinely atrocious. There is no set training module or program. Rather, new employees quasi-shadow overworked senior employees who do not have adequate time to fulfill their responsibilities and train new hires. Their responsibilities always take priority due to fear or reprisal from managers, so the turnover rate for new employees is high. Within the past year, one department had onboarded and terminated four employees (this was on a team of about 12 employees). There are no guidebooks or videos for employees to reference, they are entirely reliant on the notes they take from their superior. Because there is not any real uniformity, this means most employees conduct their tasks in different ways. - Alongside the problems with training, the structure of most departments is weird. It is unclear who is superior to who, and there are not really direct reports in any serious way. My trainer took extensive PTO shortly after I began, so my "training" was taken over by another employee. This employee performed their tasks differently than my trainer, and when my trainer returned from their trip they had me relearn how to perform these tasks so I could complete it their way. Later, the employee who had taught me a different way (not my trainer) advised me to continue performing the task the way I had originally been taught, because all employees were supposed to perform it this way, indicating that my trainer had taught me the wrong way to do something. Just a completely unprofessional waste of time. - Much of the work in certain departments like reservations or operations is menial and can be done with lines of programing. Exhaustive notes are taken for a litany of tasks that should be ran by programs. There are half-baked apps that work for some things, but not others. These bizarre merry-go-rounds often involve multiple departments and apps when they should take ten seconds to complete. - Feedback is hard come by and even harder to decipher. Because training is conducted by senior employees who do not have experience in evaluating employees, I found most meetings more confusing than anything. I would receive certain feedback in a meeting, before hearing different feedback from a third party. I am not sure if this was from office gossip or an inability for superiors to be critical in person. - The work is largely menial and boring. If you work at Ama, you will stare at a computer screen for 40 hours a week, and you will largely work alone. - Most of the pros of this company have pretty serious drawbacks. Yes, the PTO program is generous, but the company only has 5 paid holidays. So if you want to have NYE off, you will need to use one of those PTO days. If you want a free river cruise, you will need to accrue and use at least five PTO days, and your partner will need to pay for their airfare. Plus, while a free cruise is nice, most new employees are making at most $50,000 a year. If you find a job paying you $60,000 a year - congrats, you have covered the cost of the cruise. - Lastly, with all of these problems Ama still has pretty lofty expectations for its employees. The work is uninteresting, but it is also time consuming, with many steps and responsibilities. If any of it is messed up, the lowliest employees will be blamed. Employees are worked pretty hard, and most are burnt out. Morale just is not very high, and most employees are on the chopping block.