Performance Excellence Manager

Career.Boutiquegroup.com; Saudi Arabia; On-site; SAR 300,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

The Red Palace in Riyadh seeks a Performance Excellence Manager to strengthen service execution, guest experience performance, and continuous improvement across the property.

Reporting to hotel leadership, you will champion guest feedback, develop standards, and coach teams to embed best practices while supporting pre-opening readiness and live operations.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Hospitality, Quality Management, Business, or related field.
• Experience in luxury hospitality operations and guest experience management.
• Familiarity with Forbes Travel Guide, LQA, and guest feedback tools.
• Ability to translate data into practical actions.
• Fluency in English; Arabic language skills are advantageous.

Responsibilities

• Own the Voice of Guest process across surveys, reviews, social listening, direct feedback, and observations.
• Identify trends and translate insights into clear actions with owners, timelines, and measurable outcomes.
• Lead service recovery for high‑impact cases with empathy, pace, and ownership.
• Coach leaders to close the loop with guests and colleagues and embed improvements.
• Design and deliver the Red Palace Excellence Programme with priorities and milestones.
• Lead quality audits and SOP compliance across Rooms, F&B, Spa, and other departments.

Skills

Analytical thinking

Coaching

Stakeholder management

Service excellence

Quality data interpretation

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Hospitality, Quality Management, Business, or related field

Job description

About The Red Palace

A symbol of Saudi Arabia’s heritage, The Red Palace stands as an extraordinary landmark in Riyadh, now reimagined as an ultra-luxury boutique hotel. Originally built in 1943, this historic Palace has been transformed into a masterpiece of refined hospitality, blending timeless elegance with contemporary sophistication.

Nestled in the heart of the capital, The Red Palace offers an exclusive glimpse into the Kingdom’s storied past, featuring meticulously restored architecture, curated cultural experiences, and unparalleled service. Every detail has been thoughtfully designed to honor its legacy while delivering a modern interpretation of luxury. At The Red Palace, we invite guests to step into a world of history, prestige, and indulgence, where tradition and innovation seamlessly come together.

THE POSITION

The Performance Excellence Manager is an operational quality and capability role accountable for strengthening service execution, guest experience performance, and continuous improvement across Red Palace. The role acts as the palace guest champion, translating guest insight, quality data, audit findings, and operational observations into practical actions that raise standards and improve performance.

Working closely with the Hotel Manager, Director of Organisational Readiness, Learning & Development, Quality, and departmental leaders, the role ensures that service expectations are understood, practised, measured, and embedded in daily routines. The position supports both pre-opening readiness and live operational performance, with a clear focus on Forbes, LQA, guest feedback, service recovery, standards compliance, and colleague capability.

The Performance Excellence Manager is highly visible on the floor and trusted in the heart-of-the-house. The role requires a warm, credible, and engaging presence, with the ability to coach leaders and colleagues, build confidence, identify root causes, and convert improvement opportunities into sustained operational habits.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Guest Experience

• Own the Voice of Guest process across guest surveys, online reviews, social listening, direct feedback, and operational observations.
• Identify trends, recurring issues, and moments that matter, translating insight into clear actions with owners, timelines, and measurable outcomes.
• Lead and support escalated service recovery for high-impact cases, ensuring empathy, pace, ownership, and appropriate follow-through.
• Coach leaders and operational teams to close the loop with guests and colleagues, ensuring that feedback leads to visible improvement.
• Support the consistent execution of guest-facing SOPs, service behaviours, and the Boutique Group Legacy of Service across all departments.

Service Excellence Programmes

• Design, coordinate, and deliver a structured Red Palace Excellence Programme with clear priorities, milestones, and benefits.
• Lead regular Excellence Clinics to review guest feedback, audit gaps, recurring defects, and corrective actions with departmental leaders.
• Establish practical standards libraries, playbooks, quick reference guides, and service tools that make expectations simple to understand and apply.
• Champion a solutions-focused service mindset, ensuring colleagues are equipped to offer alternatives, resolve issues, and avoid unnecessary service barriers.
• Pilot service improvement initiatives on a small scale, measure impact, and support the roll-out of ideas that demonstrably improve the guest and colleague experience.

Operational Quality Oversight

• Lead risk-based quality walks, operational observations, and scheduled audits across Rooms, Front Office, Food and Beverage, Spa, Engineering, and support functions.
• Validate SOP compliance through observation rubrics, scoring tools, and calibration with Heads of Department to ensure consistent interpretation of standards.
• Map end-to-end guest journeys to identify friction points, service gaps, and operational hand-offs requiring improvement.
• Coordinate focused improvement sprints with clear success criteria, ownership, and follow-up mechanisms.
• Capture learning from guest incidents, service failures, near misses, and operational defects, ensuring corrective actions are embedded into daily practice.

Coaching and Capability

• Design and deliver targeted coaching, briefings, simulations, role plays, and micro-learning interventions linked directly to guest feedback, audit results, and operational priorities.
• Coach Heads of Department, Assistant Managers, supervisors, and departmental trainers to deliver effective daily coaching and reinforcement.
• Partner with Learning & Development to ensure training interventions address real operational gaps and improve service execution.
• Translate quality findings into practical learning assets, refreshers, and quick guides that strengthen colleague confidence and consistency.
• Track adoption and effectiveness of interventions, adjusting content and coaching approaches based on evidence and operational feedback.

KPI Tracking and Reporting

• Build and maintain a Performance Excellence Dashboard covering guest experience survey results, online reputation, Forbes and LQA readiness, audit scores, service recovery cycle time, complaint ratios, corrective action closure, and training adoption.
• Prepare concise weekly performance narratives that highlight trends, risks, priorities, and next actions rather than reporting numbers in isolation.
• Track ageing, closure, and effectiveness of corrective actions, escalating delays or repeated issues where required.
• Use data to identify root causes and inform practical interventions with departmental leaders.
• Maintain accurate, audit-ready records of quality walks, audits, action plans, service recovery logs, and guest insight dashboards.

Corrective Actions and Collaboration

• Co-create corrective actions with departmental leaders, ensuring each action has a clear owner, due date, expected outcome, and follow-up mechanism.
• Convene regular Quality Council discussions with Executive Committee and departmental leaders to unblock issues and maintain improvement momentum.
• Support pre-opening inspections, internal readiness reviews, simulations, and snag-list follow-up, ensuring quality and service gaps are closed before opening.
• Work collaboratively with Operations, Learning & Development, Quality, People & Culture, IT, and Data teams to improve service delivery and performance insight.
• Ensure cross-functional issues are escalated constructively and resolved in a way that strengthens the overall guest and colleague experience.

Health, Safety, and Regulatory Compliance

• Ensure quality observations and service improvement activities take account of Fire, Life, Health, Safety and Security requirements.
• Escalate operational risks identified during quality walks, simulations, inspections, and guest journey reviews.
• Collaborate with relevant departments to ensure compliance-related service processes are understood, practised, and embedded.
• Support readiness reviews by checking that health, safety, and regulatory expectations are visible in training, operating routines, and departmental follow-through.

CORE CAPABILITIES

• Builds credibility through consistent, ethical, and transparent behaviour.
• Creates confidence through calm, fair, and constructive communication.
• Handles guest, colleague, and performance matters with discretion and sound judgement.
• Establishes trust quickly with operational teams by being visible, practical, and supportive.
• Follows through on commitments and demonstrates reliability under pressure.
• Balances warmth and empathy with clear performance expectations.
• Understands personal impact and adapts approach to different stakeholders and operational situations.
• Seeks feedback and reflects on effectiveness to continuously improve.
• Maintains composure and professionalism during guest issues, service failures, and periods of pressure.
• Balances confidence with humility and openness to operational insight.
• Recognises personal strengths and limitations, seeking support where required.
• Responds constructively to challenge and changing priorities.
• Builds capability and confidence in others through coaching, feedback, and practical reinforcement.
• Strengthens the talent pipeline by developing service confidence and quality awareness across teams.
• Creates alignment around service expectations, quality priorities, and shared accountability.
• Builds collaboration between departments to resolve guest journey and hand-off issues.
• Encourages open discussion of performance gaps without blame or defensiveness.
• Helps teams understand how their actions affect guest experience and overall palace performance.
• Strengthens momentum through regular follow-up, visible progress, and recognition of improvement.
• Breaks down silos by connecting guest feedback, audit results, and operational action.
• Connects service excellence, colleague capability, and quality performance to Boutique Group’s broader brand ambition.
• Anticipates guest experience risks and translates them into practical improvement priorities.
• Uses insight to focus attention on the issues that will have the greatest operational and reputational impact.
• Balances immediate service recovery needs with longer-term capability and process improvement.
• Identifies patterns and root causes rather than responding only to isolated symptoms.
• Supports the development of scalable practices that can benefit future palace operations.
• Applies operational, commercial, and quality insight to performance discussions and decision-making.
• Understands the relationship between guest experience, reputation, colleague capability, and financial performance.
• Uses data and observation to identify opportunities to reduce defects, rework, and service recovery costs.
• Balances exceptional service with practical operational efficiency.
• Interprets performance indicators clearly and translates them into action.
• Contributes to value creation through improved service consistency and stronger guest loyalty.
• Links operational performance to financial and commercial outcomes.
• Takes ownership for quality processes, performance follow-up, and improvement momentum.
• Sets clear expectations for action owners, due dates, and measurable outcomes.
• Tracks progress consistently and escalates delays or repeated issues appropriately.
• Holds self and others to high standards of service execution and follow-through.
• Challenges underperformance constructively and with evidence.
• Ensures corrective actions are embedded into daily routines rather than treated as one-off fixes.
• Makes timely, well-judged recommendations based on guest insight, operational observation, and quality data

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in Hospitality, Quality Management, Business, or a related field.
  • Proven experience in luxury hospitality operations, quality, service excellence, learning, or guest experience management.
  • Strong knowledge of hospitality audits, Forbes Travel Guide, LQA, guest feedback tools, SOP compliance, and service recovery processes.
  • Experience designing and delivering coaching, service simulations, briefings, or capability-building interventions.
  • Strong analytical capability with the ability to translate data and guest insight into practical operational action.
  • Excellent interpersonal, coaching, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
  • Ability to work effectively across front-of-house, heart-of-house, corporate, and operational environments.
  • Strong organisational skills with the ability to manage dashboards, action plans, audits, and follow-up routines.
  • English fluency required; Arabic language skills are advantageous.
  • Understanding of the local Saudi context, cultural expectations, and luxury guest requirements is advantageous.