Senior Director, Travel Operations & Customer Experience

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 #LI-KC1

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.