Managing Director Attractions in Manchester

The Managing Director - Attractions & Experiences is a commercially driven, product-mindful and highly strategic leader who will shape and scale our global Attractions & Experiences business in line with Booking.com’s strategy and mission. The role leads the vision aligned with Booking’s strategy and mission, building a compelling traveler proposition while accelerating supply, demand, partnerships, and innovation. Currently we offer around 300,000 attractions worldwide to our Booking.com customers.

Key Priorities

• Further develop Booking.com’s supply strategy to ensure a strong offer and availability for its customers while ensuring a strong partner value proposition.
• Ensure best-in-class customer experience to help our customers plan, book and manage their Attractions and Experience bookings.
• Partner with other BUs to strengthen our market position and effectively accelerate demand generation and cross-sell opportunities further.
• Ensure continued effective leadership, governance, operating cadence and performance culture within the vertical.
• Effectively and responsibly integrate AI into processes and ways of working to increase productivity but also improve our customer proposition.

Key Relationships:

• Reports to: SVP, Trips
• Direct reports: Product, Commercial and Operations leaders within the Attractions/Experiences organisation (3)
• Key peer relationships: Trips MDs for other verticals, other business unit peers including Accommodations, Marketplace, Fintech, Marketing, Finance

Location: Flexible – Amsterdam (preferred)/Manchester/London. Travel required.

Key Responsibilities

• Business leadership and strategy: Define and lead the long-term strategy for Booking.com’s Attractions & Experiences vertical, aligned with Booking.com’s priorities and traveler needs. Set a clear vision for how attractions and experiences can become a differentiated and material growth engine within the wider connected trip proposition. Own the vertical’s business performance, including growth, profitability, and partner quality. Identify new growth opportunities across geographies, customer segments, inventory types, and business models.
• Commercial growth and marketplace development: Build and scale a high-quality global supply base across activities, attractions, tickets, and experience providers. Develop commercial strategies that improve assortment, availability, pricing competitiveness, and conversion. Lead relationships with key strategic partners, distributors, operators, and ecosystem players. Drive marketplace health by balancing traveler demand, partner success, operational excellence, and unit economics.
• Product and customer proposition: Partner closely with Product and Technology leaders to create a best-in-class traveler and partner experience. Champion a customer-first approach that improves discovery, merchandising, booking flow, trust, flexibility, and post-booking experience. Ensure the vertical benefits from Booking.com’s broader platform strengths in personalization, cross-sell, mobile, payments, and loyalty. Help shape the roadmap for differentiated experiences products that strengthen brand relevance and repeat engagement.
• Cross-functional leadership: Serve as the senior point of alignment across Commercial, Product, Marketing, Finance, Operations, Analytics, Legal, and Customer Service. Lead through influence across a complex matrix organization, ensuring clarity of priorities, ownership, and outcomes. Build operating rhythms, KPIs, and governance mechanisms that improve decision-making and execution speed. Represent the business with senior internal stakeholders, external partners, and industry forums.
• Operational excellence: Establish clear performance metrics and business reviews across supply growth, conversion, attachment, repeat, NPS, partner satisfaction, and margin. Drive execution discipline and accountability across teams to deliver against ambitious goals. Ensure scalability of processes, tools, and operating models as the business grows. Partner with legal, compliance, and trust teams to uphold high standards around safety, quality, and regulatory requirements.
• Team leadership: Build, inspire, and develop a high-performing leadership team for the vertical. Attract top talent and foster a culture of pace, ownership, innovation, and collaboration. Coach leaders across multiple functions and geographies, creating strong succession and capability depth. Act as a visible and motivating leader who can align teams behind a compelling ambition.

Ideal Experience and skills

• Significant senior leadership experience in marketplaces, e-commerce, or another fast-scaling digital platform business.
• Experience in Travel and Experiences are desirable but not a must.
• Proven track record of owning and scaling a complex consumer-facing business or category with meaningful revenue responsibility.
• Strong commercial experience, including supply-side strategy, partner negotiations, business development, and go-to-market execution.
• Strong understanding of marketplace dynamics, including liquidity, pricing, conversion, partner economics, and customer behavior.
• Experience working closely with product and technology organizations to shape digital products and customer journeys.
• Demonstrated success leading cross-functional, and international teams in a matrixed environment.
• Experience setting strategy while also driving operational execution and performance management.
• Ideally brings experience in tours, activities, attractions, ticketing, leisure, online travel, or adjacent consumer internet sectors.
• Bachelor’s degree required; MBA or equivalent advanced degree is a plus.

Strategic and commercial leadership

• Strong strategic thinker with the ability to translate vision into measurable business outcomes.
• Excellent commercial instincts and a sharp understanding of what drives scalable growth with ability to negotiate effectively and build long-term partnerships.
• Data-driven individual, with the ability to make high-quality decisions in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.

Customer and product orientation

• Deep commitment to customer experience and a strong intuition for what creates traveler value.
• Comfortable partnering with product and tech teams to prioritize features, propositions, and platform investments.
• Data-informed, with strong analytical judgment and fluency in performance metrics.

Leadership and influence

• Exceptional leadership presence with the credibility to engage at executive and board level.
• Highly effective in matrixed environments; able to align senior stakeholders without relying solely on direct authority.
• Strong negotiator.
• Strong people leader with a track record of building trust, developing talent, and raising the performance bar.

Execution and resilience

• Action-oriented, with a bias for pace and accountability.
• Comfortable balancing long-term ambition with near-term delivery.
• Resilient, adaptable, and effective in navigating change, complexity, and competing priorities.

Communication and partnership

• Outstanding communicator, both internally and externally.
• Strong negotiation and relationship-management skills.
• Able to represent Booking.com with senior partners and industry stakeholders in a compelling way.

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.