About Tripadvisor
The Tripadvisor Group connects people to experiences worth sharing, and aims to be the world's most trusted source for travel and experiences. We leverage our brands, technology, and capabilities to connect our global audience with partners through rich content, travel guidance, and two-sided marketplaces for experiences, accommodations, restaurants, and other travel categories. The subsidiaries of Tripadvisor, Inc. (Nasdaq: TRIP), include a portfolio of travel brands and businesses, including Tripadvisor, Viator, Cruise Critic and TheFork.
Cruise Critic is the world's largest cruise reviews and information platform, with millions of engaged travellers at every stage of their cruise journey. This role represents a significant opportunity to shape an entirely new commercial chapter — building ancillary and non-endemic revenue streams that complement the core business, add genuine value to users, and create lasting partnerships with some of travel's most exciting brands.
For the right candidate, this is a rare chance to build something new within an established, trusted brand — with the mandate, the audience, and the cross-functional support to make it happen
Cruise Critic is looking for a driven, entrepreneurial Manager of Partnerships & Business Development to lead the identification, pursuit, and activation of high-value commercial relationships outside of the core cruise
endemic category.
This is a hunter role — built for someone who thrives on opening doors, building pipelines from scratch, and closing partnerships that create real, measurable value. You will be the primary driver of new revenue from ancillary travel categories and emerging verticals, bringing net-new partners into the Cruise Critic ecosystem and helping establish the commercial models to grow them over time.
You will sit within the Growth Partnerships Pod, working in close collaboration with the Pod's activation, product, and strategy leads to move opportunities from first conversation to live partnership. This is not an account management or renewal role — it is about finding and winning new business.
Location: US- Florida or Remote
What You'll Do
New Business Development & Pipeline Building
- Proactively identify, target, and pursue partnership opportunities across ancillary travel verticals — including travel insurance, shore excursions, hotels, airport transfers, parking, luggage logistics, eSIM/connectivity, and port experiences.
- Build and manage a robust, structured pipeline of prospective partners across non-endemic and emerging commercial categories relevant to the cruiser journey.
- Lead all stages of the business development cycle: outreach, qualification, pitching, negotiation, and deal closure.
- Develop and own a prospecting framework and prioritization approach to maintain focus on highest-value opportunities.
- Represent Cruise Critic at industry events, trade shows, and networking opportunities to generate leads and raise brand profile in new verticals.
Commercial Strategy & Opportunity Evaluation
- Assess commercial viability and strategic fit of new partnership opportunities, including revenue potential, user value, and operational complexity.
- Develop pricing models, revenue-share structures, and commercial terms that are competitive, sustainable, and scalable.
- Work with internal stakeholders to build compelling, data-informed business cases for new opportunities.
- Maintain a clear view of the competitive landscape and emerging monetization models across travel and adjacent industries.
- Provide accurate forecasting and pipeline reporting to senior leadership on a regular cadence.
Partner Relationships & Stakeholder Management
- Serve as the senior external face for Cruise Critic in new partner conversations, building trusted relationships with key decision-makers.
- Collaborate with the Growth Partnerships Pod to ensure smooth handoff from deal close to partner activation.
- Act as a key liaison between new partners and internal teams — ensuring early-stage partner needs are understood and translated into actionable briefs.
- Support expansion opportunities where new partners evolve into deeper, multi-faceted commercial relationships.
Cross Functional Collaboration
- Work closely with Product, Editorial, Marketing, CRM, and AdOps to shape partnership structures that can be realistically activated onsite.
- Partner with the Pod's product and activation leads to define clear, lightweight launch paths for new commercial opportunities.
- Provide commercial intelligence and market insight to inform broader business strategy and portfolio prioritisation decisions.
- Contribute to the development of scalable processes, pitch materials, and commercial frameworks that support the wider Growth Partnerships Pod.
Skills & Experience
- 5-10 years of experience in business development, partnerships, or commercial roles — ideally within travel, media, e-commerce, or a marketplace business.
- Demonstrable track record of hunting and closing net-new commercial partnerships, not just managing existing accounts.
- Demonstrated ability to use AI tools to improve efficiency, quality, and decision-making in day-to-day work.
- Proven ability to operate effectively with a global-first mindset
- Experience building partnerships across ancillary travel categories, affiliate or rev-share models, or consumer marketplaces is strongly preferred.
- Familiarity with digital media commercial models including sponsorship, content partnerships, and performance-based structures.
- Experience with Salesforce or equivalent CRM for pipeline management and forecasting.
Key Skills
- Proven hunter mentality — proactive, relentless in lead generation, and motivated by opening new doors.
- Strong commercial acumen and ability to develop and evaluate pricing and revenue-share models.
- Exceptional ability to build rapport quickly and influence senior decision-makers externally.
- Strategic thinking balanced with a bias for action and execution.
- Strong negotiation, presentation, and communication skills — written and verbal.
- Analytical mindset with the ability to interpret data, size opportunities, and build business cases.
- Self-motivated, resilient, and comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
- Highly collaborative — able to work cross-functionally and bring internal teams along on the journey.
Performance Indicators
Metric
Focus
New partner pipeline volume & value
Quarterly targets agreed with leadership
Number of new deals closed
Net-new, non-endemic partnerships
Revenue generated from new verticals
Against annual commercial targets
Pipeline-to-close conversion rate
Quality and efficiency of deal flow
Time from deal close to partner activation
Handoff effectiveness with Pod
Market coverage
New verticals entered or actively pursued
What We Offer:
- Competitive compensation packages (routinely benchmarked against the latest industry data), including base salary and annual bonuses
- "Work your way" with flexibility to suit your lifestyle. Tripadvisor Group takes a remote-friendly approach to collaboration across a worldwide team, with the option to join on-site as often as you'd like or as required by your team.
- Flexible schedule. Work-life balance is ingrained in our culture by design. Trust and accountability make it work.
- Donation matching. Give back? Give more! We match qualifying charitable donations annually.
- Tuition assistance. Want to level up your career? We love to hear it! Receive annual support for qualified programs.
- Lifestyle benefit. An annual benefit to spend on yourself. Use it on travel, wellness, or whatever suits you.
- Travel perks. We believe that travel is employee development, so we provide discounts and more.
- Employee assistance program. We're here for you with resources and programs to help you through life's challenges.
- Health benefits. We offer great coverage and competitive premiums.
- Generous referral scheme. Help us grow and be rewarded with generous awards for referring successful candidates.
Our Cultural Pillars:
Traveler first
We exist to create value for our customer, the traveler. We enable our suppliers and partners to unlock this value. Their collective behaviors and insights are what drives us.
Execution is our edge
We act fast, experiment, learn from failure, iterate, and improve the solutions of tomorrow across every aspect of our business. Our execution is agile, data-driven, prioritised, and built to scale. We assume no problem is someone else's problem and finish what can be done today, knowing tomorrow will bring fresh challenges.
We succeed together
The best outcomes are driven by empathic, humble, and diverse subject matter experts working toward shared goals. We collaborate relentlessly, challenge assumptions, give actionable feedback, and set each other up for success through empowered teams with a clear charter. We transparently take ownership of our growth, individually and as a team. We celebrate the quality of our effort, our learnings, and our collective achievements.
The salary range for this role is $130,000-140,000. This is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. An employee's pay position within the wage range will be based on several factors including, but limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs. This compensation range may also be modified in the future.
We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please make sure to reach out to your individual recruiter or our team at [email protected].
If you have any additional questions about careers at Tripadvisor you can email us at [email protected]. We have all the answers!
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