Guest Booking-and-Loyalty Digital Recovery Director — Hotel Group

The mandate

An international lodging group widened a redesigned direct-booking journey and unified member sign-in across fourteen countries over one release weekend. Properties soon reported rooms available in the central channel but closed locally, qualifying members received public rates, some refundable stays retained deposits, payment-token failures reappeared during modification, and withdrawn marketing consent remained active in selected markets. The portfolio director stepped aside when the release review could not establish which source governed each guest promise.

The incoming director is expected to assume the seat within sixteen calendar days of signed terms and remain for twelve months. Executive search will launch once the year-end peak has been completed on stable controls, with the selected permanent leader joining for the final six weeks. The appointment has a firm end: delayed recruitment will be covered internally, and unfinished discretionary features will return to the standing product organisation.

Handover will be accepted only through a traceable booking record from search quotation to reservation, change, arrival and cancellation; agreement between central and property inventory for controlled cohorts; correct member-rate and benefit decisions; reversible deposit and token events; market-valid consent proof; and closed ownership for every guest remedy. Two peak-demand exercises and one live promotional period must pass, after which the successor will authorise a production release and defend its evidence to the commercial-risk committee.

This executive can block digital deployment, alter sequence inside the approved £27 million portfolio, assign temporary recovery leads, direct contracted engineering effort and set the control evidence required before a market rejoins the common journey. Authority does not extend to allocating a particular room, directing a property team, changing revenue-management prices, interpreting loyalty liability, appointing permanent executives or committing unbudgeted spend above £2 million; those decisions remain with their designated officers.

Property operations, housekeeping, food and beverage, hotel-opening activity and management-agreement negotiations are deliberately outside the boundary. The director will not replace the property-management estate, rewrite the loyalty programme’s financial accounting or determine compensation for an individual complaint. Interfaces and facts from those domains are inputs to recovery, not an invitation to command them.

Why this seat is open

One launch combined visible experience changes with unresolved ownership underneath inventory, rate, deposit and consent decisions. Regional teams protected guests through local interventions, but those interventions destroyed the group’s ability to compare conversion or prove a consistent promise. A time-limited portfolio authority is being installed to settle the digital control plane before long-term product leadership is chosen.

What you will own

• Reconstruct the booking evidence chain across offer display, member recognition, availability response, rate rule, deposit instruction, token event, confirmation, modification and cancellation.
• Classify every reported contradiction by property source, central service, channel cache, market rule or presentation defect, then assign a dated disposition rather than a generic backlog label.
• Rebalance the £27 million change book around trustworthy reservation outcomes, consent repair, peak resilience and direct-channel economics, explicitly closing initiatives whose benefit cannot be evidenced.
• Institute a market-entry decision that joins property readiness, reservation integrity, loyalty rules, payment recovery, privacy proof, service scripts and rollback capability.
• Exercise holiday demand, flash-sale and partial-property-outage scenarios at production-scale volumes, including delayed inventory responses and a failed payment-token provider.
• Establish a performance bridge from searches to stayed-room revenue that separately exposes rate mismatch, abandoned payment, assisted rescue, cancellation, remedy cost and member recognition failure.
• Equip the successor with an accepted control catalogue, country exceptions, vendor obligations, decision history and funded roadmap, then observe that leader chairing a release without borrowed authority.

Candidate qualifications

• Directed a regulated consumer-digital portfolio worth at least £18 million across ten or more countries, balancing new propositions, compulsory change, acquisition and conversion in one prioritisation system.
• Personally recovered a high-volume platform release where reported commercial progress conflicted with transaction evidence, customer treatment or operational truth downstream.
• Brings at least one substantial assignment in hotel distribution, airline retail, online travel or another perishable-inventory journey involving reservation, modification and fulfilment dependencies.
• Led cloud migration, application consolidation or core-platform renewal while maintaining end-to-end evidence across legacy interfaces, external providers and country variants.
• Governed loyalty, membership or relationship-based propositions in which eligibility, consent, monetary treatment and assisted recovery had to remain consistent across channels.
• Commanded product, engineering, risk, operations and supplier teams in several regions and completed a transition through live decisions rather than presentation-only knowledge transfer.

Non-negotiables

• Can enter the London role within sixteen calendar days of contract signature and reserve full professional capacity for the twelve-month appointment.
• Will maintain three office days each week and undertake up to five working days monthly at regional offices or representative properties for evidence reviews.
• Has accountable exposure to reservation-led travel or lodging commerce; banking and payments delivery without an adjacent inventory-bound customer journey is not sufficient.
• Must declare financial interests or current work involving the reservation engine, property-system providers, loyalty platform, tokenisation service and principal delivery partners.

1. 49 words maximum. Confirm your earliest London start, current notice position and any commitment that could interfere with exclusive service for twelve months.
2. 49 words maximum. Describe a reservation or inventory contradiction you resolved across digital display and fulfilment; which record became authoritative, and why?
3. 49 words maximum. Give one portfolio decision where stronger acquisition or conversion concealed a material consent, payment or service-recovery weakness.