Senior Director, Travel Operations & Customer Experience

Range Group - Job Postings; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 150,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

TripArc seeks a Senior Director, Travel Operations & Customer Experience to own care, servicing, and fulfillment after the sale. The role is hybrid, with a minimum of two days per week at the Downtown Toronto office, and reports to the SVP Platform & Technology.

You will lead service strategy, SLA governance, and 24/7 operations across channels for flights, hotels, activities, and packaged itineraries, while shaping automation and supplier escalation processes to protect premium guest

Qualifications

• 5+ years in customer experience, travel operations, or leadership.
• Hands-on Sabre GDS experience: PNR, ticketing, exchanges/refunds.
• Knowledge of luxury travel supplier systems and programs.
• Experience designing and enforcing 24/7 SLAs.
• Experience selecting and governing outsourced/offshore BPO.
• Familiarity with CCaaS tools and QA/call-monitoring.
• Strong analytics for SLA/CSAT/NPS reporting.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Own round-the-clock service coverage, SLAs, and cost per contact across channels.
• Design tiered service model and routing logic for 24/7 operations.
• Collaborate with offshore BPO on QA, calibration, and performance.
• Build and own SLA dashboards and report gaps to leadership.
• Manage air travel risk, fulfillment integrity, and supplier escalations.
• Lead 2/3 senior travel consultants and training programs.
• Partner with product/engineering on observability and automation.
• Report NPS and CSAT trends to executives.

Skills

Customer experience leadership

GDS experience

Vendor management

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Sabre GDS

Virtuoso program

Ensemble program

Travel Edge

Job description

_ This is a hybrid role with a minimum of 2 days a week at our office located in Downtown Toronto. _

About TripArc

TripArc builds and operates the technology platform that powers travel agencies and advisor networks across North America. We’re now launching new direct-to-consumer luxury services built to bring the same standard our sister brand, Kensington Tours, already delivers — to a client base that rates its service above 80 NPS — to a broader, digitally-driven luxury traveler. For that promise to hold, the journey has to feel flawless end to end, and air, the single highest-risk leg of any trip, has to be watched more closely than anything else we sell.

We’re looking for a Senior Director, Travel Operations & Customer Experience to own the promise after the sale: care, servicing, fulfillment, and the assisted trip design a premium positioning requires. This is a foundational leadership hire — one of the first in this new channel — reporting to the SVP, Platform & Technology. You’ll own how we measure and enforce service quality across every stage of the trip; 24/7 frontline issue resolution will run through an offshore BPO shared-service partner; you’ll be the final word on Sabre GDS and supplier escalations too complex for the frontline; and you’ll push AI and automation into the workflow everywhere it can catch or fix a problem before a client ever sees it.

Key Responsibilities

Service Strategy & SLA Ownership

• Own round-the-clock service coverage, service levels, and cost per contact across every channel — chat, phone, email — and every vertical TripArc sells: flights, hotels, activities, ground transfers, and curated packages.
• Design the tiered service model and routing logic: what our 24/7 offshore BPO shared-service partner owns at tier 1, what senior in-house consultants own at tier 2/3, and exactly where that line sits.
• Work with the BPO partner(s) delivering tier-1 and surge capacity — running the QA audits, calibration sessions, and performance reviews that hold them to TripArc’s standard, not just the contracted minimum.
• Build and own the SLA and quality dashboards — satisfaction, first-contact resolution, handle time, contact rate — and report performance and gaps to leadership on a standing cadence.

Air Travel Risk & Fulfillment Integrity

• Treat air as the highest-risk leg of the journey: own dedicated monitoring, playbooks, and rebooking authority for schedule changes, cancellations, misconnects, and other irregular operations (IROPS).

• Own fulfillment integrity — tickets issued, documents delivered, changes executed correctly — including the pre-ticketing fare and rule audit that keeps airline debit memos off the books.

• Serve as the internal escalation point for issues beyond BPO or frontline capability: complex Sabre GDS PNR problems, exchanges, refunds, and multi-supplier itinerary breaks.

• Maintain current, hands-on fluency in Sabre GDS and in the supplier and consortia programs — luxury rate programs such as Virtuoso, Ensemble, and Travel Edge, plus hotel and activity supplier portals — that Kensington’s inventory and rates depend on.

AI-Assisted Automation & Contact Deflection

• Drive contact deflection with Product rather than absorbing volume with headcount — partnering on self-service, AI-assist, and proactive notifications so issues are caught, and where possible resolved, before a client or agent notices.

• Partner with Engineering on the observability signals — booking-status mismatches, silent failures, schedule-change events — that should trigger automatic remediation or an early alert instead of waiting on a client-initiated contact.

• Define what "resolved automatically" looks like for our highest-frequency failure modes, and own the roadmap to get there jointly with Product.

Team & Vendor Leadership

• Hire, train, and manage in-house tier-2/3 capability: senior travel consultants who resolve what tier 1 and automation cannot, and who coach the floor while doing it.
• Translate Kensington’s luxury service standard into concrete, auditable procedures that both the BPO and the in-house team can execute consistently.
• Build round-the-clock coverage the right way — staffing plans that reflect the true cost of 24/7, not just a schedule with names on it — and a named deputy for every critical function.
• Own the supplier escalation path when a supplier, not Kensington, is the point of failure: recover costs where the fault is theirs and feed performance into commercial reviews.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Sit as one of the founding pillar leads for Triparc, reporting to the SVP, Platform & Technology, and represent the customer in product and engineering planning — roadmap prioritization, incident retros — backed by SLA and NPS data.
• Build the advisory capability that separates a luxury brand from a commodity marketplace, partnering with Trip Design on assisted, high-touch servicing.
• Report NPS, CSAT, and SLA trends to executive leadership with clear, actionable recommendations.

Qualifications

Must have:

• 5+ years in customer experience, travel operations, or support leadership, including at least 3+ years in a senior role owning a 24/7, multi-channel service organization — ideally at an OTA, travel agency, or other GDS-dependent business.
• Hands-on experience with a Global Distribution System (GDS) (ideally Saber): PNR management, ticketing, exchanges/refunds, and schedule-change handling.
• Working knowledge of other travel supplier systems and portals — hotel supplier extranets, luxury consortia/rate programs (e.g., Virtuoso, Ensemble, Travel Edge), and activity or ground supplier platforms.
• Proven experience designing, measuring, and enforcing SLAs across a round-the-clock, multi-channel support operation, including the real staffing and cost economics of 24/7 coverage.
• Direct experience selecting, contracting, and governing an outsourced or offshore BPO / shared-service partner.
• Familiarity with CCaaS/support tooling (e.g., Twilio Flex or comparable) and QA/call-monitoring practice.
• Comfortable partnering with engineering on observability and automation concepts — alerting, SLOs, AI-assisted triage — without needing to write the code yourself.
• Strong analytical skills: able to build and interpret SLA, CSAT, and NPS reporting and drive root-cause analysis, not just report the number.
• Excellent written and verbal communication across technical, operational, and executive audiences.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have:

• Experience at a luxury or premium travel brand, tour operator, or high-end hospitality organization.
• Additional GDS experience (Amadeus, Travelport).
• IATA/ARC ticketing background, including agency debit-memo prevention or dispute experience.
• Experience building or scaling an outsourced/offshore contact center from the ground up.
• Experience with AI-assisted support automation — chat deflection, anomaly detection, auto-remediation.
• Additional languages.

Compensation

We provide a competitive compensation package with a strong pay-for-performance rewards approach. Employees have the opportunity to participate in incentive programs and compensation tied to business and individual performance. The expected compensation range for this position is: $150,000 to $175,000 CAD.

The actual compensation may vary depending on local market conditions, geography, and relevant job-related factors such as knowledge, skills, qualifications, experience, and education/training. #LI-Hybrid

We are committed to providing employment accommodation in accordance with the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. If you require accommodation due to a disability at any stage of our hiring process, please advise us when completing your application.