Interim Chief Operating Officer — Travel Platform Recovery

The mandate

A new airline connection created duplicate bookings, ticketing failures and refunds without consistent source status, and the COO resigned after the issue spread into peak travel. The connection is constrained, but customers and airline partners need one executive owner for recovery and normal operations.

The interim must start within two weeks for nine months, covering backlog repair and the next holiday peak. A permanent COO search begins after the airline reconciliation standard is approved, with extension possible for one month if peak timing delays handover.

Handover is complete when every affected booking has a verified status and customer outcome, refunds reconcile to airline and payment cash, priority integrations operate within error tolerance for ninety days, and the successor chairs one peak-readiness review.

The interim may throttle partners, change routing, add temporary service capacity and use ₹10 crore of recovery spend. Aggregate redress above ₹8 crore, partner termination, permanent director hiring, material service-fee change and new market entry require CEO or board approval.

Marketing, airline contracting strategy and replacement of the booking platform are outside scope. The COO runs accepted transactions and partner service without owning demand generation or long-term distribution architecture.

Why this seat is open

The incident exposed fragmented ownership between booking, ticketing, payment and customer teams. Current leaders also dispute whether source or platform status should govern customer action. A temporary COO can establish one operational truth before the permanent travel cycle begins.

What you will own

• Build an authoritative affected-booking inventory across reservation, ticket, airline, payment, refund and customer-contact states.
• Decide customer remediation by travel status, service failure, payment evidence and recoverability.
• Reconcile airline statements, payment cash, tickets and refunds through transaction-level exception closure.
• Set partner throttles and routing based on booking success, confirmation latency, refund control and support capacity.
• Establish integration acceptance gates covering normal, cancellation, change, partial and duplicate scenarios.
• Prove ninety days of stable priority-partner operation and one peak-readiness exercise.
• Transfer partner controls, refund exposures, open customer cases, capacity plan and peak calendar to the permanent COO.

Candidate qualifications

• Held COO, travel operations chief or customer-operations director authority in online travel or transaction platforms.
• Recovered large booking, ticketing or refund failures involving airline systems.
• Reconciled partner, payment and customer records at transaction level.
• Managed high-volume service operations through a holiday or disruption peak.
• Exercised partner throttling despite revenue and inventory consequence.
• Understands travel distribution, ticket lifecycle and customer-remediation operations.

Non-negotiables

• Available in Delhi NCR within fourteen days.
• No current role with affected airline, reservation-system or payment partners.
• Will prioritise verified customer status over gross booking volume.
• Must have held end-to-end booking and refund operating authority.

1. 49 words maximum. Confirm availability and disclose any airline, reservation or payment conflict.
2. 49 words maximum. Describe a booking-status incident you recovered and the record treated as authoritative.
3. 49 words maximum. Which exception would make you throttle an airline connection immediately?