SANDEMANs Tours is looking for a Regional Operations Manager to lead day-to-day tour operations across our Edinburgh, Dublin, and London destinations. This is a hands-on, on-the-ground role for someone who loves tourism, thrives with guides and guests, and wants ownership over how a region performs.
You’ll be joining at a pivotal moment: SANDEMANs is in the middle of a major operational transformation, migrating our booking systems onto a single new platform and building toward a marketplace model across our 80+ destinations. We’re hiring four Regional Operations Managers this cycle, and plan to promote one of them into a newly created Operations Director role once the team is established — this posting is a genuine pathway into that role, not just a title.
Key Responsibilities
- Own daily tour operations across Edinburgh, Dublin, and London — scheduling, guide coverage, capacity, and on-the-ground problem solving.
- Recruit, onboard, and develop tour guides; run auditions and selection processes to find strong, engaging personalities.
- Monitor tour quality: guest reviews, ratings, complaints, and in-person or spot-check observations.
- Track regional KPIs — ratings, guide performance, attendance, cancellations, profitability — and report on them regularly.
- Build and maintain relationships with local partners, venues, and suppliers.
- Support the testing and rollout of new products and tours in your cities.
- Work closely with central Operations leadership and other regional managers to keep standards consistent while adapting to local market realities.
- Manage a regional team of roughly 3–6 local staff and 30–45 guides (1–2 local staff and 10–15 guides per city).
What We’re Looking For
- Experience in tourism, hospitality, or experience-based operations, ideally with people-management responsibility.
- Comfortable managing guides or customer-facing teams — recruiting, coaching, and holding standards.
- Strong organisational skills and comfort managing across multiple cities and stakeholders.
- Confident with performance data and KPIs; commercially minded.
- Fluent English; additional languages an advantage.
- Willingness to be based in Edinburgh or Dublin and travel regularly to London (expect roughly 7–10 travel days per month).
- Comfortable with a tourism schedule: this role typically includes one evening per week and 1–2 weekends per month.
- Already holding the right to work in your base country — we’re not able to sponsor visas for this role.
- Familiarity with Ventrata (or a similar tour/activity booking platform) is a strong plus; knowledge of OTA product management, When I Work, Google
- Workspace, Claude, or HubSpot is a bonus — the more of these you know, the better.
Reporting & Start Date
Reports to the Interim Operations Director initially, transitioning to the permanent Operations Director once appointed.
Target start date: between October 15 and November 15.
What We Offer
- Salary: £34,000–£45,000 gross/year if based in Edinburgh, or €35,000–€48,000 gross/year if based in Dublin, reflecting local cost of living. Exact figure depends on experience and confirmed base city.
- Bonus: split 50% on company performance and 50% on individual KPI targets, typically worth 1–2 months’ salary.
- Relocation support available for the right candidate.
- A genuine growth path as SANDEMANs builds out its regional and senior operations structure, with a real chance at the Operations Director role.
- The chance to shape how a fast-growing international tour company runs its operations, right as we modernize our systems and products.
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