What You'll Do

Lead Guest Understanding & Experience Intelligence

• Develop and execute the organization's guest research and insight strategy.
• Establish a deep understanding of guest behaviors, motivations, expectations, and decision-making across the voyage lifecycle.
• Lead qualitative and quantitative research efforts including interviews, observational research, guest immersions, surveys, focus groups, and behavioral studies.
• Identify emerging trends, unmet needs, and experience opportunities.
• Ensure guest understanding informs strategic, operational, and product decisions across the organization.

Lead Journey Governance

• Own the end-to-end guest journey framework and governance model.
• Maintain and evolve the guest journey map as a living management tool rather than a static deliverable.
• Establish ownership, accountability, and operating rhythms around key stages of the journey.
• Ensure initiatives, investments, and improvement efforts are evaluated through the lens of the guest journey.
• Facilitate cross-functional alignment around journey priorities and opportunities.
• Identify disconnects, overlaps, and gaps across the guest experience ecosystem.

Evaluate Designed vs. Delivered Experiences

• Assess how experiences are actually being delivered versus how they were intended to function.
• Conduct experience audits, observations, voyage immersions, and operational reviews.
• Identify service gaps, friction points, breakdowns, and missed opportunities.
• Surface opportunities for experience improvement, optimization, and innovation.
• Provide objective assessments of experience quality and consistency.

Generate Actionable Insights

• Synthesize research, guest feedback, operational observations, and performance data into actionable insights.
• Translate findings into opportunities that inform Voyage Experience, Experience Design, Operations, and Executive Leadership.
• Develop guest personas, behavioral frameworks, journey insights, and opportunity assessments.
• Ensure insights drive prioritization and decision making.
• Serve as a trusted voice of the guest across the organization.

Build Organizational Capability

• Establish best practices for guest research, journey management, and insight generation.
• Foster a culture of curiosity, learning, and guest-centered thinking.
• Educate stakeholders on guest behavior, journey dynamics, and experience quality.
• Partner with leaders across the organization to embed guest understanding into everyday decision making.
• Help create a continuous learning culture across Customer Experience and Operations.

Success Looks Like

• Guest understanding becomes embedded in strategic and operational decision making.
• The guest journey serves as a common framework for prioritization and investment decisions.
• Journey ownership and accountability are clearly understood across the organization.
• Experience opportunities are identified before they become guest complaints.
• Journey maps are actively used to guide improvements and product decisions.
• Guest insights directly influence product strategy and experience development.
• Friction points and missed opportunities are systematically identified and addressed.
• The organization develops a deeper understanding of guest behavior and experience quality.

What We're Looking For

Experience

• 8–15+ years of experience in customer insights, customer experience, journey management, service design research, behavioral research, hospitality research, or related disciplines.
• Proven experience leading guest or customer research programs.
• Experience building and maintaining journey maps as operational or strategic management tools.
• Experience influencing business decisions through insight generation and opportunity identification.
• Experience working across highly collaborative and matrixed organizations.

Skills & Capabilities

• Exceptional curiosity and guest empathy.
• Strong qualitative and quantitative research capability.
• Deep journey mapping and journey governance expertise.
• Ability to synthesize complex information into actionable recommendations.
• Strong storytelling and communication skills.
• Systems-thinking mindset.
• Ability to identify patterns, opportunities, and root causes.
• Strong stakeholder management and facilitation capability.
• Ability to connect guest understanding to strategic action.

Ideal Backgrounds

• Customer insights leadership
• Service design research
• Experience strategy
• Luxury hospitality guest insights
• Consumer behavior research
• Human-centered design research
• Customer experience consulting
• Travel and hospitality experience research