Commercial Trading Lead - UK in Manchester

As we embark on the next exciting phase of our growth, we’re excited to grow our Commercial Trading team and have an exciting opportunity for a Commercial Trading Lead to join us.

About Awaze

We’re home to some of the world’s most trusted travel brands, including cottages.com, Hoseasons, and Novasol (to name just a few!). Together, these brands make us the largest managed vacation rental business in the world. We’re proud to have over 100,000 properties in our portfolio, in 25 countries across Europe, giving our guests the choice of a fantastic range of properties and taking over 1.5 million bookings each year.

The Role

To support the next exciting phase of growth for the business, we are seeking a dynamic and strategic Commercial Trading Lead to join the Trading team. The successful candidate will be responsible for developing and executing comprehensive trading plans, improving customer propositions, and ensuring competitive market positioning. This role requires a proactive individual with strong analytical skills and the ability to drive commercial performance within a fast-paced environment. The role will be based in our Manchester office a minimum of 3 days a week. Some travel will be required given the pan-European/multi-office nature of our business.

What you’ll be doing

• Develop Annual Plan: Develop and implement the annual trading plan to achieve key business objectives for our customer-facing brands.
• Develop Quarterly Trade Plan: Formulate quarterly trading plans, aligned with the annual strategy which outlines the key trading promotions/events, marketing and media plans to ensure realisation of the quarterly financial targets, cognisant of key arrival periods.
• Define High Level Events: In collaboration with Revenue Management and Marketing teams, identify and develop key promotional events to drive high levels of customer engagement, bookings and net revenue.
• Improve Customer Proposition: Working in partnership with the Product and Marketing teams leverage insight to enhance the end-to-end customer journey to maximise conversion and marketing effectiveness leading to direct sales channel growth.
• Market & Competitive Insight: Comprehensively monitor the relevant travel market(s), our performance within it and keep up to date with our ‘share of wallet’ competitors to inform trading decisions to maintain a competitive edge, maintaining market position.
• Reflect Lessons Learned/Retro Insight: Complete post-event trading retro’s to constantly learn, adapt and refine future trading activity, with the aim of delivering better financial outcomes.
• Weekly Commercial Performance: Monitor the businesses daily commercial performance, identifying trends and opportunities across the key levers to performance trajectory.
• Weekly Trading Plan Execution: Ensure the effective execution of the weekly trading plan, coordinating with relevant teams.
• Contingency Planning & Trading Toolkit: Develop and manage trading contingency plans to mitigate risk and capitalise on opportunities. This includes establishing and deploying an effective trading toolkit when performance requires us to take action.
• Briefing/Matrix Alignment: Coordinate and align with cross-functional teams through an effective briefing process to ensure all trading priorities are executed optimally with the appropriate channel support to meet the commercial needs of the event.
• Briefing/Managing Trading Backlog: Manage the trading backlog, ensuring timely and efficient execution of tasks across the broader trading community.

Key Skills We Need

We’re a team full of energy and with a passion for what we do, so it’s key that you’re enthusiastic, driven and keen to be part of a team. What else do you need in order to succeed in this role?

• Comprehensive experience gained within a trading or commercial role, either within a pureplay or travel business.
• Strong analytical and strategic thinking skills.
• Ability to interpret complex datasets to extract meaningful insights.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
• Highly adaptable with the ability to operate within a fast-paced environment and manage multiple inflight priorities.
• Ability to develop and coordinate trading initiatives which deliver commercial outcomes contributing to overall business objectives.
• Proficiency in market analysis and competitive intelligence.

Equally as important as all the technical “stuff”, we’re looking for someone who is hungry to learn, irrespective of their seniority. We don’t believe in standing still (we work in travel, after all), but instead think that everyone should be learning, all the time. Whether it’s a new piece of software, an industry event or a mentoring opportunity, we will support you to grow your skillset.

If you’re excited by working in a fast paced environment, are obsessed by all things customer and want to join us on our journey, we’d love to chat.

What we’ll give you

• You’ll be supported by a team of genuine, passionate leaders.
• You’ll have the freedom to decide on the best way of working to get the job done.
• We work cross-functionally, so you’ll be given opportunities to develop skills outside of your core skillset.
• You’ll have the chance to see your designs reach a large audience.
• We offer a competitive salary and benefits; we’re all about holidays, so we practise what we preach and offer some great travel discounts.
• We offer flexible working hours and hybrid working, too.

What else do you need to know?

We want to make the application process as stress-free as possible, so typically we’ll have an informal chat with you on the phone, followed by a comprehensive interview over Teams, where you’ll have a chance to find out a bit more about the exciting things we’re doing (and maybe tell us what we’re doing wrong). We want to hear about your favourite (and least favourite) projects, what makes you tick and why. Then, we’d love to show you “our place” so would look to meet you for an informal session in our office.

We believe in equal opportunities and aim to create a team that is representative of our society, knowing that embracing differences enhances the capabilities of our business and makes for a happy place to work. We are proud to recognise and celebrate that we have a diverse culture where employees are accepted for who they are, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion or ability.