Chief Product Lead, Merchandising & Trip Planning

Booking.com; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Booking.com in Amsterdam is seeking a Director of Product for Merchandising & Trip Planning to lead CTM and Trip Planning product organization, owning an 18-month direction for cross-sell, promotions and trip planning decisions.

The role spans Home Screen, Unified Merchandising System, and recommendations, with accountability for customer impact, business outcomes, and product quality, while partnering with engineering, data and ML teams.

Qualifications

• Extensive product leadership experience (10+ years) leading multiple PM teams at Director scope.
• Experience in merchandising, recommendations, personalization, or ecommerce at consumer scale with AI/ML relevance.
• Strong commercial acumen: incrementality, iROI, contribution margin.
• Applied AI product proficiency and tech fluency; govern responsible AI use.
• Excellent stakeholder leadership and strategic thinking; strong English.
• Background in travel, marketplaces, consumer digital products, merchandising or trip planning.

Responsibilities

• Own merchandising and trip planning strategy for Connected Trip with 18 month direction.
• Define strategic narrative across Home Screen, Unified Merchandising System, AI‑driven recommendations, and the end‑to‑end Trip Planning experience.
• Own department‑level outcomes and a measurable performance narrative linked to financials and investment decisions.
• Lead the organisation across product groups with 18 month planning and resource allocation.
• Ensure delivery excellence and raise the bar on product quality; reliability, maintainability, compliance, cost efficiency, operational health.
• Lead migration from fragmented rendering into the Unified Merchandising System and deprecate duplicated logic.
• Partner with Engineering leadership on multi‑year architectural investment decisions shaping the Unified Merchandising System.
• Connect merchandising and trip planning into the commercial operating model; collaborate with incentives and AI/ML leaders.
• Lead cross‑BU initiatives where merchandising and trip planning intersect with Search, Genius/loyalty and platform teams.
• Develop leaders, design and evolve the organisation structure and hire/coaching of senior PMs/GPMs.
• Lead as a people manager with delegation and feedback, contributing beyond core scope.
• Own the Home Screen as the trip‑aware entry point and direct travellers to Trip Planning or discovery.
• Own the Unified Merchandising System and the Recommendations engine; enable trip‑aware cross-sell.
• Make cross‑sell recommendations trip‑aware and integrate incentives and loyalty into the decisioning layer.
• Establish shared merchandising principles, experimentation and attribution approaches; collaborate with AI/ML teams.
• Own end‑to‑end "Plan a trip" experience across web and app; shape long‑term strategy for intent‑driven planning.
• Define how trip planning integrates with search, recommendations, notifications and partner products.
• Own itinerary creation and multi‑destination trip packaging and strategy.

Skills

Product leadership

Leading PM teams

Merchandising & personalization

AI/ML proficiency

Strategic thinking

English proficiency

Job description

Director of Product, Merchandising & Trip Planning

About Booking.com

Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest ecommerce companies in the world. Booking.com is the largest business within Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) and accounts for the vast majority of Booking Holdings’ total revenue. Booking Holdings is a leading Fortune 500 e-commerce conglomerate with a market cap of roughly $140 billion. Booking.com currently employs approximately 13,000 employees in 140 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

With a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, Booking.com invests in digital technology that helps take the friction out of travel. Booking.com connects travelers with the world’s largest selection of incredible places to stay, including everything from apartments, vacation homes, and family-run B&Bs to 5-star luxury resorts and even tree houses. The Booking.com website and mobile apps are available in over 44 languages, offer more than 28M total reported listings, and cover over 174,000 destinations in 229 countries worldwide. Offering 30 different types of places to stay, including homes, apartments, B&Bs, hostels, farm stays, bungalows, even boats, igloos, and treehouses. So whether travelling for business or leisure, customers can instantly book their ideal accommodation quickly and easily, without booking fees and backed up by its promise to match. Via the customer experience team, customers can reach Booking.com 24/7 for assistance and support in over 44 languages, any time of the day or night.

At Booking.com, we are all involved in making hundreds of decisions every day. The decisions we make are a reflection of our Values - they reflect what is important to us, both as individuals and as an organisation.

When Values are made explicit, they provide clarity on what “good” looks like. And when they are shared, they build unity in a group. They build culture.

• Think customer first. We obsess about adding value for our customers - guests, partners, colleagues - to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
• Own it. We deliver on our promises, make informed decisions and prioritize to get the important things done today.
• Learn forever. We are resilient, take time to reflect, and seek to learn – from colleagues, from the outside world and from our failures.
• Succeed together. We celebrate team success, through making connections, building trust and valuing the diverse perspectives of others.
• Do the right thing. We get the right results the right way. For each other, our communities and the world around us.
  
  
  

Profile

As Director of Product – Merchandising & Trip Planning, you will lead the Connected Trip Merchandising (CTM) and Trip Planning product organisation within Marketplace Product Experience, owning the 18 month direction for how Booking.com merchandises cross-sell recommendations, promotions and next‑best‑actions and helps travellers plan, shape and manage end‑to‑end trips — turning fragmented, surface‑specific merchandising and a standalone planning experience into one shared, trip‑aware decisioning and planning layer.

Operating at Product Director scope, you are responsible for multiple product groups (Home Screen, the Unified Merchandising System, Cross-sell, and the end‑to‑end Trip Planning experience), accountable for customer impact, business impact and Product Quality / Excellence, and a key player in Marketplace's Commercial Levers strategy. Trip Planning is the first strategic use case for the Unified Merchandising System and the natural home for trip‑aware decisioning, which is why merchandising and trip planning are led together in this role.

Responsibilities:

Product vision, strategy and outcomes

• Own the merchandising and trip planning strategy for Connected Trip and set a clear 18 month direction, translating company, Marketplace and Commercial Levers strategy into an aligned portfolio direction with sharp trade‑offs.
• Define the strategic narrative and sequencing of major bets across Home Screen composition, the Unified Merchandising System, AI‑driven recommendations, and the end‑to‑end Trip Planning experience..
• Own department‑level outcomes and a measurable performance narrative using Connected Trip outcomes (incremental multi‑vertical attach, recommendation engagement, trip‑level success) and shared Commercial Levers economics (incrementality, iROI, contribution margin, CPiMVT), linked to financials and investment decisions.
  
  
  

Organisation leadership and delivery

• Lead the organisation across multiple product groups, driving 18 month planning and resource allocation while balancing short‑term commercial delivery with long‑term capability investments.
• Ensure delivery excellence and raise the bar on product quality — reliability, maintainability, compliance, cost efficiency, operational health, recommendation explainability and adherence to NFRs at scale.
• Lead the migration from fragmented, legacy rendering into the Unified Merchandising System, with Trip Planning as the first strategic use case, ensuring capabilities are operationally ready and duplicated logic is deprecated.
  
  
  

Cross‑functional and cross‑organisational collaboration

• Partner with Engineering leadership on multi‑year architectural investment decisions shaping the Unified Merchandising System, the Recommendations stack and the Trip Object / Trip Platform within the broader Connected Trip platform.
• Connect merchandising and trip planning into the commercial operating model — partnering with incentives and AI/ML decisioning leaders, participating in the weekly trading rhythm, and contributing to cross‑lever arbitration when levers compete for the same traveller, surface or moment.
• Lead complex cross‑BU initiatives where merchandising and trip planning intersect with Search, the verticals, Genius / loyalty and platform teams, and represent the area in VP / SVP‑level forums with clear options and decision requests.
  
  
  

People leadership and product craft

• Develop leaders, design and evolve the organisation structure (including integrating trip planning teams), and hire, coach and performance‑manage senior PMs and GPMs for strong team and portfolio health.
• Lead as a true people manager with clear delegation and direct feedback, and contribute beyond core scope to Marketplace PX, Connected Trip and the wider PM craft.
  
  
  

Merchandising domain – specific responsibilities

• Own the Home Screen as the trip‑aware first interaction point and "traffic controller", directing travellers to Trip Planning, broad discovery or vertical funnels based on need and intent.
• Own the Unified Merchandising System as a single, AI‑first, reusable capability that replaces fragmented rendering, and the Recommendations engine that operationalises "next best action" across non‑search surfaces using the Trip Object and Traveller Intelligence as standard inputs.
• Make cross-sell recommendations trip‑aware, explainable and consistent across surfaces, and integrate incentives and loyalty so Genius and MVT incentives surface through the same decisioning layer as one coherent value story.
• Establish shared merchandising principles, the recommendation feedback loop, and the experimentation and attribution approach so impact is measurable across surfaces without double‑counting, partnering with Engineering, Data and ML on AI‑enabled merchandising and GenAI dynamic content with human‑in‑the‑loop guardrails.
  
  
  

Trip Planning domain – specific responsibilities

• Own the end‑to‑end "Plan a trip" experience across web and app, from inspiration through to booked itinerary and post‑booking engagement.
• Shape the long‑term strategy for intent‑driven trip planning, making differentiated use of intent signals, AI/ML and personalisation, and define how trip planning integrates with search, recommendations, notifications and partner products.
• Own itinerary creation and management, cross‑vertical trip packaging, and saved trips and inspiration surfaces, and set the strategy for representing multi‑destination, multi‑product trips and measuring trip‑level success.
  
  
  

Ideal Experience & Skills:

• Extensive product leadership experience (typically 10+ years), including several years leading multiple PM teams and managers at Product Director scope (multiple product groups, multi‑year strategy, complex cross‑BU initiatives) in a complex, global environment.
• A track record in merchandising, recommendations, personalisation, growth, journey orchestration or e‑commerce / marketplace product at consumer scale, ideally where AI/ML‑driven relevance and commercial outcomes were central, including ownership of end‑to‑end, intent‑driven journeys and journey‑level metrics.
• Strong commercial acumen and portfolio thinking: comfortable owning commercial outcomes and reasoning in terms of incrementality, iROI, contribution margin, CPiMVT, overlap and cannibalisation.
• Strong Applied AI Product Proficiency and Tech Fluency: able to evaluate product AI opportunities (recommendations, ranking, decisioning, GenAI content, conversational planning), govern responsible AI use, and partner on architecture and long‑term technical health.
• Excellent stakeholder leadership and Strategic Thinking, able to influence senior leaders through structured narratives, options and clear decision framing. Strong command of English, written and spoken.
• Background in travel, marketplaces, consumer digital products, merchandising, recommendations, personalisation, trip planning or AI‑enabled commercial product experiences, working at the intersection of traveller‑facing experiences, platform capabilities, AI / ML systems and commercial decisioning.
  
  
  

Pre-Employment Screening

If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.