Director of Partnerships

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.