Director of Data & Insight – Luxury Travel
Location: UK, Remote (Must be based in the UK)
Salary: £100,000 to £120,000 plus 25% bonus and benefits

Although this is a Director role, reporting to C-Suite and the Board. The company is only around 200 people, and their data infrastructure is still in a growth and development phase. What this translates to is a role which will need you to be comfortable getting your hands dirty rather than having a big team to delegate things to for delivery. As currently the data function is just two reports. Both very sharp and capable, one being an analyst, the other a data engineer.

But this is a growth mandate, and the reason they’re looking for a Director appointment is for a need to bring in someone with a sharper commercial and business focused mindset. Rather than biasing towards a technical skillset who is competent and capable when it comes to the model creation and technical build side of things.

Keys to success

You’ll be taking over the reigns to all things data for a well-recognised luxury travel brand. This business will be undergoing positive changes following acquisition by a global hospitality business. Those changes will include looking at exploiting the partnership opportunities the two businesses combined can offer to consumers, as well as what could be achieved with their combined data assets too.

In addition will be growth of your unit and team. As functionally you will be overseeing all aspects of data including:

• Data strategy and governance – aligning these with the company’s overall vision and strategy. Defining a data dictionary, ensuring a robust governance framework is in place for data quality and processes
• Application of advanced analytics and insights within the business – be it through pricing strategies and application of AI solutions for this, coupled with advanced modelling capabilities in understanding customer behaviour, retention modelling, customer segmentation and cannibalisation prevention.
• Maintenance and continued evolution of the company’s reporting capability. Currently based on Looker, and with a wider business that’s relatively self-sufficient at pulling what they need. Your team drops in to support on complex new report builds when needed. But there’s going to be opportunity to also overall and review what’s in place regularly to ensure it’s fit for purpose and delivering to business needs
• Define the future business needs around the field of data science and AI, and their commercial application within the business. Current capabilities have been more traditional advanced analytics capabilities (CRM analytics, retention, propensity modelling). With this, they’re looking for you to identify opportunities to bring in new capabilities and successfully land them into commercially meaningful and impactful solutions for the business. E.g. AI LLM chatbots for customer service solutions or website automation. Or AI application for pricing recommendation engines to drive pricing optimisation strategies.
• Oversee the continued development of the company’s data engineering pipeline and capabilities. It’s all currently sitting on a Redshift platform with ETL through Airflow. Data is all in the one location and the data feeds are reliable. Trading data only has a minor delay, so work can be carried out with near-real time data. But this will continue to grow and evolve with the business, and you will ultimately be responsible for taking ownership of all data pipelines. Ensuring they’re representative of robust, scalable solutions.

As you can see, there’s a lot of moving parts to this role. But keep in mind contextually they represent a medium sized organisation who caters for a luxury niche within the travel industry.

Whilst your role will be broad and be responsible all their respective data estate. A lot of what’s in front of you will be a mandate to build and evolve their capability from the current, relatively small state. Into one which will become a much more large-scale, robust capability as the business continues to grow and develop, and you see your role respectively grow alongside it.

Some of this will be achieved through the existing team. Some of this will require additional support and the establishment of new business cases for investment from the Board. You will be responsible for defining and selling these in. With expectation for growth to come in 2025 and beyond to help you achieve the company’s ambitions.

If you’ve got the kind of drive and determination to take on an opportunity like this with such a great deal of potential ahead of it. Why not apply today to find out more?

Experience needed

• Solid leadership credentials within the data and analytics industry. Having had experience working across data and insight, data engineering, data science, data strategy.
• Your experience leans more towards commercially minded rather than technically biased these days. But you’ve come from that world, so can coach, mentor, train and develop analysts, data engineers, data scientists, etc. But these days you’re more comfortable and adept at selling in the business concepts and value data creates, rather than just doing the coding.
• You love to build high performing data teams who in turn create value for companies
• Good knowledge of the various technologies and data ecosystems out there for data science, engineering, reporting, AI solutions, etc. and their application
• Have worked with consumer data and had a good level of experience working in a marketing/customer analytics type of environment before
• Able to demonstrate commercial impact of your work and the value it’s driven for businesses

Want to Apply? Here’s how:

You can share your Linkedin profile or email me a CV – it doesn’t have to be up to date, we can work on that once you decide you want to take this forward.

Or, for a chat and more information please contact me on:

Colin Doree
Head of Recruitment, Marketing, Digital & Data
Blue Pelican
colin@bluepelican.com