Management often acts on the fly, and is frequently uncertain about how to handle situations. Management also has a habit of actively trying to suppress discussions regarding pay. The pay at this company is embarassing, paying beneath the city of Seattle's minimum wage requirement, and attempting to write this off by saying that reservation agents make commission. Yet working full time at $18 an hour I couldn't qualify for an apartment anywhere in the city unless I paid a substantial fee. The call center is ridiculously understaffed, but Management does nothing to encourage employees to stay. I started with this company in February, was told it was possible for me to be paid $20 an hour, and despite getting rave customer reviews from day 1 and being the highest earner in my class, I wasn't even granted a 90 day review. When I attempted to discuss a higher wage, I was frequently shut down. However, nearly every agent in the office is disgruntled by the pay rate, and some even printed and passed our documents which showed we did not make the minimum wage. Despite having access to cameras, I was called into an office and blamed for this, whereafter I was told "we pay you guys enough, okay? We DO pay you guys enough, and fairly." Naturally, this came from someone who made at least three or four times what I did. The turnover rate at this company is alarming, and considering the intense understaffing, the attitude of leadership towards their staff, and the high volume of calls received, this is not shocking. Of my class of 6 people, 2 remain. Of those 2, 1 has already made plans to leave. We were hired on February 20th and in 5 months they've lost 4 people, and fired 1. This is not just because of being understaffed, though, as Clipper's entire website is riddled with misinformation, broken links, and unreachable details that are vital for the guests booking. My last two weeks with the company were spent trying to handle all the discrepancies and glitches from the website, and during this time the website began to malfunction, creating a situation where guests would book travel only to find out the website automatically selected options they did not want. As a commission-based agent, that meant there was no sale to be made from these calls - and these were the calls that clogged up our queue for entire days of work, while we were understaffed and without management even in the building. The commission rate here is also a joke, and commission is actively used against you an an employee to ensure that you can't discuss pay without going into the complexities of planning, budgeting requirements, and general reality. Management lives in a fantasy world where a non-guaranteed amount of commission is supposed to be acceptable, despite base pay not covering our bills. The plot here seems fairly straight-forward: pay us *just* enough so we can't complain, but make sure we can still barely afford to survive to make us *earn* our liveable wages. Because apparently working with international law, passports, creating reservations, and generally providing the support the company needs to even have a shot at survival is not enough to earn a livable wage. To put it in perspective, McDonald's workers in the city of Seattle make $19 an hour on my last search. We made $18 an hour. The city's minimum wage is $18 and change. So we weren't even making minimum wage. Let that sink in. The city of Seattle enforces an $18.00+ an hour minimum wage, and recognizes it as being the base amount anyone *must* make to survive, and we weren't even offered that as workers dealing with international travel and law. And yet we were told by management that we made enough money. Interestingly, when I spoke with one employee who has been there for years, he outright told me that during the summer it's active and jumping, but in the winter they all struggle to make ends meet. But just to add insult to injury, they began to demand that we work doubles right before I left. The travel perk with Alaska? Worst trip I've ever taken. What they don't tell you about these wonderful perks is that you may well end up stuck in an airport for literal days waiting for a flight, because no matter when you check-in, you are bumped to the very bottom of the standby list each time a new person is added. So the job offers a perk that may well cost you your job. But let's not forget the computer program - TravelBox. TravelBox is the single most underdeveloped, glitchy, regularly broken piece of trash program I have ever used at a job. The program quite literally prevents you from doing the job assigned to you, often throwing error messages that supervisors and managers just say are "widely reported" before telling you to go back to work. But our work was, and will remain to be severely impacted by this program they refuse to let go of, and it cost me multiple reservations during my tenure. On several occasions I had to restart the entire program (which takes roughly three minutes to even open), requiring me to call people back or have them reach back out. However, most of the time this would result in other agents getting the bookings or even the passengers just booking online. The system is so poorly put together that if we cha get a reservation too many times (read: 3 or 4 times) it would be corrupted, and we'd have to make an entirely new booking. That's to say nothing of the arbitrary changes that would occur in reservations we worked on, something noted on three of my own cases, as well as multiple others. In one case a tea-time I booked at one time with one supplier was completely eradicated from a booking, and because of this the passengers were overcharged. They didn't know until they attempted to go to the tea time, and were told there was no availability. That we were expected to do our bookings on a program so bad that supervisors regularly had to be consulted for their "travelbox tricks" is simply unacceptable for a business which operates at this level. And of course there was absolutely *zero* support for the program, as the programmers were in Sri Lanka, and could not be contacted during out business hours. Overall, I'm heartbroken to say that Clipper Vacations is as unorganized, chaotic, and stingy as they turned out to be. I wanted this to be my career, and to spend the rest of my time in Seattle helping people boon trips that would make memories. This was something important to me, something special that I tried to hold onto, but ultimately the troubles of the job far outweighed the joys, and by the end of my time my mental health was so severely impacted I nearly made an attempt on my life, leading to an immediate resignation. This is not what I wanted for myself, but it *is* what Clipper delivered. Any new employees, beware. The newest hires are not being given proper training and are already discussing leaving after only two weeks.
