Big Bus Tours is the world’s largest operator of open-top sightseeing tours, fuelling the spirit of adventure in 21 world-famous cities across four continents. Beginning its journey 27 years’ ago, with a fleet of only three buses, Big Bus Tours has swiftly expanded to a global fleet of over 400 hundred  open-top buses, turning 5 million tourists into explorers, every year. Big Bus Tours operates in London, Dubai, Hong Kong, New York, Las Vegas, Chicago, Abu Dhabi, Budapest, Istanbul, Miami, Muscat, Rome, Paris, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Darwin, Sydney, Vienna, Washington DC, Dublin and Singapore, with a sightseeing concept designed to provide a flexible approach to city discovery. Each open-top bus tour provides a hop-on, hop-off facility at a variety of interesting locations, with complimentary additions to enhance the visitor sightseeing experience. In February 2015, private equity firm Exponent purchased Big Bus Tours, with a shared vision to make Big Bus Tours the number 1 thing to do in each world-famous city.  In 2016, Merlin Entertainments PLC became a shareholder, offering a natural synergy with Big Bus Tours and Merlin attractions and experiences around the world. With entertaining guides and commentary and knowledge of the latest events in each city, the Big Bus City Crew leaves every passenger with a story to tell.

Background

Los Angeles is one of the most fabulous and eclectic cities in the world, and we believe that Big Bus can add a great new experience for visitors by utilising our expertise of providing tourists with a never before available experience and the perfect introduction to this world-famous city, helping them to discover and explore the wealth of things to do and places to see.

By expanding into Los Angeles, we are making this our 22nd city that we operate from. This is an exciting opportunity for you to create something very special as you will be part of the opening team and be involved in setting up the operation and infrastructure of the business.

Overall Purpose

To own partner relationships and ensure:

1.  Increase in sale of Big Bus tickets through distribution partners (any business retailing Big Bus tickets to their customers).
2. Increase in attachment rate/revenue for sale of local attraction tickets (where Big Bus would sell the attraction tickets through its distribution network).

Key Areas of Accountability and Responsibility

Planning

• To devise a sales plan for the territory to include growth from existing partners in the territory as well as recruitment of new partners with timescales, sales projections and costs.

Revenue &  Passengers

• To deliver the City Trade & Agent revenue and passenger budget.
• To drive adoption of API integration and the Partner Booking Platform across Trade and Agent channel.
• To build the Account Plans for top customers for the City & drive great relationships.
• To analyse daily and weekly sales performance and put correction plans in place as needed.
• To lead the agents and trade customer investment and commission plans.
• To be the Off-street expert and input to above country project to drive city growth.
• To allocate sales targets to team members based on accounts they manage.

Team Management & Training

• To performance manage the Agent and Trade Sales Managers and global partners in collaboration with the global teams.  
• To build and execute the partner management and compensation plans, with guidance from global teams for our Agent & Trade sales people.  
• To coach Trade and Agent team members, ensuring that team sign up to and complete Partner Management Academy and deliver against expectations set by the programme.
• In collaboration with the Global teams, to share learnings from city activities with the wider Trade and Agent teams around the world.
• To conduct performance reviews of Agent and Trade sellers.
• To lead recruitment of Agent & Trade sellers and succession planning.  

Reporting

• To report on sales performance & related insight as needed on frequency as needed.
• To report on competitor activity and advice on changes as needed to compete.

Customer Satisfaction

• To drive the team to improve our customer service satisfaction of our agent and trade customers and ensuring that we have the right mechanics to capture any such feedback from partners.

Prospecting/ Negotiating

• To actively identify & attend relevant trade events, representing Big Bus and where relevant its attraction partners.
• To support the Global Growth team in negotiating deals with partners to either increase sales or reduce costs, ultimately leading to business growth.

Account Management

• To establish a reporting process in conjunction with partners to monitor and identify growth opportunities including the creation and delivery of partner growth plans.
• To drive a “pursuit of excellence” culture & motivate partners in order to exceed goals and maximize the sales execution.
• To develop a trusted advisor relationship with key partners, customer stakeholders and executive sponsors.
• In conjunction with other city teams and Global team, to ensure the timely and successful delivery of information to partners according to their needs and objectives.
• To assist with high severity requests or issue escalations as needed.

Budgetary Responsibility

• To work with GM on sales budget to create growth year over year.

Knowledge

• Knowledge of the travel industry.
• 6 years’ experience + in the sightseeing/tour industry would be desired.

Skills

• Leadership of large teams, second line management.
• Good, clear communicator.
• Commercial experience of delivery a P&L.  
• Analysis. Ability to work with data to find insights/trends.

Experience/Qualifications

• Leadership of a large diverse team managing multiple customers.
• Proven team management experience & Coaching.
• Proven recruitment experience.
• Training delivery.
• BA/BS Degree desired but not essential.

Competencies

• Communication – Ability to express ideas or facts in a clear and persuasive manner. Convince others to own expressed viewpoint.

• Leadership – Motivates, enables and inspires others to succeed, utilizing appropriate styles. Has a clear vision of what is required and acts as a positive role model.

• Customer Focus – Exceeding customer expectations by displaying a total commitment to identifying and providing solutions of the highest possible standards aimed at addressing customer needs.

• Strategic and Critical Thinking – Takes account of a wide range of longer-term issues, opportunities and contingencies. Identifies the means of implementing plans in line with the vision and direction.

• Analytical – Effectiveness in identifying problems, seeking pertinent data, recognising important information and identifying possible causes of problems.

• Results Orientated – Consistently delivers required business results; sets and achieves achievable, but aggressive, goals; consistently complies with quality and service standards and meets deadlines; maintains focus on company goals.

• Planning and Organising – Ability to establish efficiently an appropriate course of action for self/others to accomplish a goal.

• Commercial Awareness – Able to understand the key business issues that affect the profitability and growth of an enterprise and takes appropriate action to maximize success.

• Resilience – Able to maintain effectiveness in situations of disappointment and/or rejection.