Director of Partnerships

Travel Staff

Director of Partnerships

Los Angeles, CA
Paid
  • Responsibilities

    Summary: This role is instrumental in building travel advisor distribution and national partnerships into a major growth channel. The Senior Director will own its strategy, budget, operating plan and performance across host agencies, consortia, national and regional agency networks, AAA organizations, and other priority partners.

    • This needs to be someone very senior, with extensive experience in the Travel Advisor industry with business development. This is not only a salesperson, is a channel builder.
    • They need to own budget, coordinate multidisciplinary scope across many areas of the company, understand technology, inventory, operations, marketing, business planning.
    • They also must have meaningful relationships in the travel agent consortium industry in our group travel niche.

    What Some Responsibilities Entail:

    • Set multi-year strategy, annual operating plan, and quarterly cross-functional priorities, with clear targets, investments, milestones, and owners.

    • Build the annual channel budget and own revenue, contribution profit, and spending performance against plan.

    • Build and manage the priority partnership and key-account pipeline; lead executive outreach, business cases, proposals, negotiation, contracting, and launch.

    • Own the channel-readiness roadmap. Partner with Operations, Product and Inventory, Client Services, and Technology to establish the advisor experience, booking and customer-support flows, inventory processes, internal service-level standards, tracking, and reporting needed to scale.

    • Establish clear rules of engagement: this role owns national relationships and selected key accounts, while BDMs manage local relationships and activation within partner networks.

    What We Are Looking For:

    • 10 or more years of experience in U.S. leisure travel sales, national accounts, strategic partnerships, or business development.

    • Deep knowledge of the U.S. travel advisor ecosystem and established, current relationships with senior leaders across major distribution organizations.

    • Strong commercial judgment and fluency in partner economics, business cases, annual planning, budgets, and forecasting.

    • Disciplined use of CRM and performance data to manage pipelines, forecasts, and action plans; experience with HubSpot or Salesforce is preferred.

    • Familiarity with group travel, escorted tours, river cruises, or advisor booking technology is preferred.

    ** A complete job description for full disclosure of job duties and requirements will be provided to applicants who qualify and are chosen for this role.