Job Description

About the role

Making sure you fit the guidelines as an applicant for this role is essential, please read the below carefully.

We are on a mission to be the best female travel company in the world. Female Foodie Tours operates premium, women-only culinary tours across Italy: Rome, Tuscany, Cinque Terre & Bologna, Milan & Lake Como, and more on the way.

Our tours have consistently sold out since we began five years ago, and demand well exceeds the number of seats we can offer. We don't need more bookings to grow. We need operations that can run more tours at the same standard.

We're hiring a Director of Tour Operations to make sure every guest's week in Italy is exactly as magical as she imagined, from the first hotel check-in to the last dinner. You'll own the vendor contracts, readiness milestones, on-the-ground logistics, and systems that make that week happen for every group we host.

Today, tours run well because the founders are meticulously involved in everything. Your job is to turn what the founders carry in their heads into playbooks, checklists, and a team, so the tenth tour of the season feels as personal as the first.

What you'll do

Lead tour delivery end-to-end

• Be accountable for every departure from contract to wheels-up: vendor bookings, payment schedules, guest logistics, contingency plans
• Run our milestone-based tour readiness system for every departure and improve it
• Run overlapping departures in peak season, such as a group in Rome while another lands in Florence, without any guest ever feeling it

Build the operating system

• Document, systematize, and continuously improve every operational workflow: SOPs, checklists, vendor playbooks, tour-manager runbooks
• Design the operations that let us add new regions and departures without the founders on every call
• Lead operational reporting: tour readiness, cost management, vendor performance, guest satisfaction

Manage vendors & ground partners

• Establish and maintain relationships with hotels, restaurants, guides, drivers, and experience providers across multiple Italian regions
• Negotiate contracts, lock rates well in advance, and manage payment schedules across currencies
• Line up backups for every critical partner, so a closed restaurant or a cancelled driver never breaks a guest's day

Build the ops team

• Hire and lead the ops team, including tour managers and coordinators, who will own pieces of the operation under your direction

What we'd like to see

• 5+ years of experience running complex, deadline-driven, multi-vendor operations in travel, events, hospitality, or an adjacent field
• Proven system-builder: you can show us a process you documented and handed off so completely that it survived your absence
• Experience managing external vendors and negotiating contracts
• Obsessive attention to detail and a steady hand under pressure. Our guests have waited years for this week, and it has to be flawless.
• Excellent written communication
• Self-directed and comfortable owning outcomes without daily oversight
• Able to travel to Italy occasionally during tour seasons

Bonus qualifications

• Experience scaling operations at a fast-growing small company

Reasons not to take this job

• You need a department to hand things off to. We're a small team, and there's no travel desk, legal team, or finance group behind you.
• You're only willing to do the bare minimum. Peak seasons are intense, with multiple departures running close together.
• You'd rather not be held to a high bar. Our guests expect excellence, and so do we.
• You want to run systems someone else built. Here, you'll be building them.
• You're here for the travel perks. xhyhwjd The job is delivering a magical week for our guests. Time in Italy is a perk of the job, not the reason for it.

Compensation & benefits

• Competitive salary depending on experience
• Health benefits
• Paid time off, plus company holidays
• Work laptop and home-office setup, on us
• Coworking space reimbursement
• Travel to Italy during tour seasons, fully covered
• A front-row seat to building a category-defining company

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