Nice company - Finance Business Partner Merlin Entertainments Employee Review

Cons

Terrible pay for front line workers and middle management - huge jumps up in pay to operations managers. Even have to continuously push every year just to keep pay gaps (e.g. and extra 50p above minimum for a skilled job) which they don't even keep. Multiple times the gap has gotten smaller and even closed. Staff stretched extremely thin. Some attractions gone from 4/5 years ago having huge management teams (commercial manager, ops manager, multiple duty managers, senior hosts, team leaders etc) to having just a couple of (lower paid) people expected to do the same amount of work. They seem to be banking on enough turn over so that the staff no longer remember or were never aware that their role used to have so much more support. Senior Managers claim to be very open and transparent but keep huge decisions secret from the people who should know about it until the last minute. Lack of long term thinking. So much effort seems to go in expansions and new openings with nowhere near enough focus on helping their current attractions stay open and running and get the support they need. Budgets dwindle every year. For staff, for the attraction upkeep, for new attraction investments etc. Again they seem to like acting as if this money was never there to being with - diminishing and dismissing or just outright ignoring when it gets brought up. There is not enough staff appreciation in general. They have star awards etc but just day to day verbal appreciation is greatly lacking. It did used to feel like a more personable place to work. Now it feel like everyone is so stretched and busy there's simply no time to acknowledge our team work properly. Really the biggest issue is and always has been pay. This has got to improve.