American theme park and entertainment company Seaworld has laid off around 100 employees at its in-house call center in Orlando, with local media reporting that the company had outsourced customer services to third-party providers in Guatemala in Jamaica.
The theme park company has confirmed the layoff, but promised to provide a severance package and assistance in finding a new placement.
The company said “it undertook a careful review of its operations and made a business decision to restructure its call center operations. This move will allow us to better and more efficiently scale our call center to meet customer demand, especially during peak months.”
All Seaworld said was that it had “shifted” customer service to a third-party vendor – but did not mention anything about Guatemala. Employees who lost their jobs are saying that their jobs had been shipped to a foreign country.
Some of the laid-off workers told local media that they had recently visited Guatemala to train staff at a call center there. These employees are now saying that the Guatemalan workers they had trained might have taken over their jobs, according to local media reports.
The news comes barely days after the company announced the resignation of its chief executive officer Gustavo Antorcha, under whose leadership the entertainment company appeared to improve its revenue.
Headquartered in Orlando, Seaworld operates 12 parks, including Aquatica Orlando, Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, SeaWorld San Antonio and SeaWorld San Diego.
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