Guest Experience Lead in London

We have an ambitious vision for guests' experience at onefinestay - step into the world of travel and hospitality with us and drive the team to success. Are you the travel planner in your family or group of friends, known for staying organised even when preferences and requirements quickly change? Are you excited to roll up your sleeves and take pride in delighting guests? Do you want to gain invaluable experience in a luxury hospitality brand to set you up for success in any client interaction, in any industry? If this sounds like you, then read on.

What is onefinestay? onefinestay open doors to the finest homes and villas in the most desirable destinations and deliver a one-of-a-kind service to both guests and homeowners around the world. The company launched in London in 2010 and became part of Accor in 2016. With each memorable stay, they deliver a level of personal service and professional hospitality unmatched in the private rental industry.

The Guest Experience team at onefinestay is looking for a Guest Experience Lead to join our frontline team, ensuring guests have an amazing stay. They are fully equipped to simultaneously prepare bookings, offer additional services and solve problems to make sure every guest has a seamless experience - and earn commission on any additional sales upon meeting KPIs. This is an on-call hospitality team like no other: a group of fast-paced problem solvers who eat queries for breakfast and (as a matter of honour) don’t pass the buck. That’s why we need a special sort – you’re dedicated to the cause, full of enthusiasm and a through-and-through people person.

You will be the main point of contact for guests booking our London homes, as well as the team’s first escalation point to support their customer service delivery.

What will you be doing?

• Oversee the day-to-day team workload and ensure all guests have a dedicated onefinestay point of contact upon confirming their booking.
• Ensure a perfect execution of all operational delivery ahead of a guest's stay, both within the team and calling the rest of our Market teams as required.
• Act as the first escalation point for the team to ensure execution of issue resolution in a timely and commercially efficient manner.
• Deputise for Service Manager in their absence.
• Providing feedback on the performance of team members.
• Take ownership of the recruitment, training and performance of new team members.
• Work on and manage projects within the team or in collaboration with other teams, both market-specific and global, to innovate and improve service standards and service delivery.
• Being part of the market Duty Manager team - offering advice to a team member or guest or assisting with an emergency situation at one of our homes.
• Assist clients with troubleshooting problems as they arise; acting as the contact point between guests, operational suppliers and contractors to fix any issues that might arise during a guest's stay.
• Assist clients and accounting with the facilitation of payments.
• Create & cultivate client relationships during the post-sale / pre-arrival / in-stay stages - via phone and email.
• Guide and assist clients with their trip planning once the accommodation is confirmed, create experiences with the guests that will make their stay unforgettable.
• Working with, and in some cases sourcing, worthy suppliers to help facilitate requests.
• Being the main point of contact for any complaints and disputes arising from guests.

Who are we looking for?

These are the essential requirements:

• Ownership and Ambition.
• Level-headed and positive attitude.
• Patient and attentive: you’ll have a keen eye for detail when it comes to clients and to your team as their immediate escalation point.
• You must be fluent in English.
• Enthusiastic and responsive.
• Good commercial awareness.
• Great at building relationships and communicating with a diverse client base and with internal stakeholders, to drive continuous improvement.
• Good organisation skills and able to manage your own workload autonomously.
• No qualms about working on weekends & bank holidays.
• Sound judgement and decision-making skills, even under pressure.
• Must be able to get to central London within 1 hour out of hours due to Duty Management response times.

These are the nice-to-haves:

• Hospitality experience preferred - ideally in hotel and F&B, or retail.
• Any other languages also welcome - French in particular.

What we offer

Working in hospitality will equip you with all the tools you need to learn to build and manage relationships with customers and clients for the rest of your career. We are a determined team, serious about delivering on our guests' expectation for exceptional service; in order to achieve this, the role shares some of the hospitality industry’s particulars that we wanted to be transparent on:

• We are available to our guests every day - including weekends and bank holidays. You can therefore expect to work on those, alongside members of our other Market teams, but we make up for this by having a larger annual leave allowance, to take time off during the rest of the year.
• We are available for our guests 24/7 and have global colleagues covering different time zones: locally, our operating window is 8am to 7pm daily, which means your 8-hour shift could start a little earlier, or finish slightly later than a traditional office job, and there can also be opportunities to work outside of this operating window on a global scale for support.