The New Job Descriptions: How Every Travel, Hospitality & Leisure C-Suite Role is Changing

The CEO job gets most of the attention when people talk about how leadership needs to change. 

That makes sense. The CEO sets direction. But in our work, we see something more interesting happening one level down. Every C-suite role in travel, hospitality, and leisure is being rewritten. Not tweaked. Rewritten. 

The pattern shows up across searches. A board calls asking for a CFO with hotel finance experience. During the search process, the CEO mentions wanting to launch a subscription service selling forecasting tools to other hotels. The CFO role just changed. What looked like traditional finance work now requires understanding SaaS pricing models and platform economics. The board’s original job description becomes obsolete before the search concludes. 

This happens repeatedly now. The job description a board writes reflects what the role used to be. The job the executive actually needs to do reflects what the company is becoming. That distance between the two is where most hiring mistakes get made. 

The CFO: Money is Now a Different Language

A hotel CFO used to manage property acquisition, debt financing, and operating expenses. An airline CFO optimized fleet financing and fuel hedging. A logistics CFO controlled warehouse costs and transportation spend. The vocabulary of finance stayed consistent across decades. 

The vocabulary changed. Hotels allocated 4.2% of overall revenue to IT budgets in 2023, up from 4% the year before. More telling: 63% of that budget maintains existing systems, but 37% goes to new implementations. That 37% represents bets on capabilities that don’t exist yet. The CFO needs to decide which new systems to fund, how to structure those investments on the balance sheet, and how to measure returns that won’t show up for years. 

The harder challenge is explaining these decisions to boards and investors who evaluate companies using traditional metrics. A hotel CFO presenting quarterly results used to discuss occupancy rates, RevPAR, and property-level capital expenditures. Those numbers told a clear story about business health. Now the CFO needs to justify spending $40 million on unified guest data infrastructure that won’t improve occupancy rates for three years. The old metrics don’t capture the value being created. But investors still expect to see them. 

This creates a translation problem. The CFO must speak the traditional language of hospitality finance (asset values, operating margins, debt ratios) while also speaking the new language of platform economics (customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, network effects). Most CFOs learned one language during their careers. The job now requires both, used simultaneously, often in the same board presentation. 

The CDO/CTO: When IT Becomes the Business

IT departments used to keep the website running, manage the booking engine, and fix computers when they broke. The work was important but supporting. Digital officers now own product strategy, data architecture, and often run their own P&L. The shift from “keeping things working” to “building new things” changes everything about how boards evaluate these roles. 

Roughly 80% of hotels have implemented AI technology in some form. That sentence makes it sound like adding AI was a checkbox exercise. It wasn’t. Each implementation required someone to decide which guest touchpoints to digitize, how to structure data flows between legacy systems and new platforms, and how to measure whether personalization engines actually changed guest behavior. 

Hyatt and Marriott spent 2024 migrating from Oracle’s on-premises Opera V5 system to Opera Cloud. That sounds like a straightforward system upgrade. These migrations replace central reservation systems, property management systems, and loyalty infrastructure to unify guest data across brands. The technical architecture isn’t the hard part. The hard part is answering: Which guest data should we capture? How do we make personalization work across 30 brands without eroding brand identity? How do we structure APIs so third parties can build on our platform? 

Five years ago, boards wanted CTOs who could negotiate vendor contracts and manage helpdesk operations. Now they want someone who has built APIs, architected data platforms, and understands how to monetize data assets. The job title stayed the same. Everything else changed. 

According to Hospitality Technology’s 2024 survey, 69% of executives say integrating new technology with existing legacy systems is their top problem. Someone has to decide which legacy systems to replace, which to wrap in new interfaces, and how to sequence the changes so operations don’t break. That decision requires judgment about business models alongside technical knowledge. 

The COO: Operations Meets Algorithms

An airline COO used to focus on turnaround times and on-time performance. A hotel COO managed housekeeping schedules and front desk staffing. A logistics COO optimized route planning and warehouse throughput. Operations meant managing people and physical processes. 

Operations now means managing people and physical processes AND algorithms. Hotels using automation technologies report reducing front desk and housekeeping hours by up to 18%. Rooms get cleaned based on checkout data flowing automatically to housekeeping apps. Front desk associates handle exceptions while AI handles standard check-ins. The COO manages both the human workflow and the algorithmic workflow, and they need to work together seamlessly. 

DHL’s implementation of digital twin technology at their Brazil distribution center achieved 98% accuracy in forecasting staff allocation across shifts. The COO there doesn’t just schedule warehouse workers anymore. They make decisions based on simulator outputs that predict how changes in one part of the operation will ripple through the entire facility. When the simulation says to add three workers to the morning shift and remove two from the afternoon, does the COO trust it? How do they explain that decision to the warehouse managers who have been running shifts for 15 years based on experience and intuition? 

In airline operations, weather delays a flight. The old model had separate teams handling crew scheduling, aircraft maintenance, and gate operations, each working from their own systems. The new model requires real-time coordination. The crew scheduling algorithm talks to the maintenance system and the gate management platform simultaneously. Someone needs to make sure those systems work together and that the humans operating them know when to trust the algorithm and when to override it. 

That’s operations leadership now. Half the decisions get made by people. Half get made by algorithms. The COO makes sure both halves work together. 

The CHRO: Building Culture When Half Your Team Doesn’t Exist Yet 

HR used to hire people, process payroll, and handle employee relations. The work was important but administratively focused. CHROs now sit at the center of the biggest problem facing travel, hospitality, and leisure: finding and keeping talent in an industry where 65% of hotels report staffing shortages and 71% have job openings they cannot fill despite active recruitment. 

The numbers look brutal because they are. Housekeeping positions are 38% of unfilled roles, front desk positions are 26%. Hotels have increased wages by 26% since the pandemic, but the labor shortage persists. Money alone doesn’t solve this. The CHRO needs to answer harder questions: How do we make hotel work appealing to people who could earn similar money in less demanding industries? How do we build career paths when automation is changing what front-line jobs look like? How do we compete with tech companies for data scientists and product managers? 

90% of companies using skills-based hiring report it reduces their mis-hires, and 94% agree it’s more predictive of on-the-job success than resumes. The CHRO who figures out how to implement this well gains access to talent pools that credential-focused competitors miss. A hotel that values someone who can learn new technology quickly and work collaboratively matters more than whether they have previous hospitality experience. That requires the CHRO to redesign job descriptions, interview processes, and evaluation criteria. 

Predictive analytics now helps identify patterns that may lead to employee turnover, allowing for proactive measures. The CHRO who can use data to forecast which employees are likely to leave in the next 90 days, and why, can intervene before the problem becomes a crisis. 

We see this in how boards evaluate CHRO candidates now. They want someone who understands workforce analytics, who can speak credibly about employee experience, and who knows how to integrate digital talent (engineers, data scientists, product managers) with legacy operational talent (pilots, front desk staff, warehouse managers). The cultural bridge-building matters as much as the recruiting pipeline. 

The CMO: When Marketing Becomes Product Design

A hotel CMO used to manage advertising, partnerships with travel agencies, and loyalty programs. An airline CMO focused on route marketing and ancillary revenue. The core question was always: How do we get more customers? 

The question changed. Now it’s: How do we own the relationship across an entire journey? 

Personalization requires capturing data about guest behavior, building systems that analyze patterns, and creating touchpoints that deliver customized experiences without making guests feel tracked. The CMO who succeeds at this thinks like a product manager, not just a marketer. 

Travel brands that move from one-size-fits-all offers to one-to-one personalization can increase revenue per guest by an average of 49.8%, according to research by Incisiv and Adobe. That ROI gets everyone’s attention. But achieving it requires the CMO to work closely with the CTO on data architecture, with the COO on implementing personalized service delivery, and with the CFO on measuring customer lifetime value rather than just conversion rates. 

Email marketing still delivers $36 for every $1 spent, making it one of the highest-ROI channels. But generic emails don’t work anymore. 73% of shoppers expect brands to understand their needs. The CMO needs segmentation strategies sophisticated enough to send different messages to business travelers, leisure travelers, families, and couples, all based on their actual behavior, not just demographic guesswork. 

69% of marketers have integrated AI into their marketing operations. The CMO’s job now includes understanding how AI can automate content creation, optimize ad spending, and personalize recommendations at scale. But it also requires knowing when AI produces generic output that damages credibility. The balance between automation and authentic human connection determines whether the technology helps or hurts. 

In our work with hotel groups, we’ve seen marketing leaders succeed when they understand how to build customer data platforms that unify guest information across properties, online interactions, and loyalty programs. The ones who think like product managers, who can structure first-party data collection and measure incremental lift from personalization, tend to drive better results than those who think purely in advertising terms. 

Why Traditional Job Descriptions Miss the Point

When we talk to boards about C-suite searches now, the conversation often starts in the same place: “We need someone who knows our industry.” Domain knowledge matters. Understanding the economics of hotel operations, or airline route planning, or logistics networks provides context that outsiders lack. 

But that framing misses something bigger. Every C-suite role in travel, hospitality, and leisure now requires two types of knowledge: traditional industry expertise and platform/data/ecosystem thinking that often comes from outside the sector. 

The best hires we’ve made in the last three years share something specific: they can explain complicated ideas in simple terms to people who built their careers in the old model. They respect what made the business successful historically while being clear about what needs to change going forward. They can hold two ideas simultaneously without letting either one go. 

About the Author

Toon Balm is a Partner at Stanton Chase Amsterdam, specializing in executive search across consumer products and services, with particular expertise in the travel, hospitality, and leisure sectors. Toon previously held strategic leadership roles at Air France KLM across Nigeria, Iran, Italy, China, and the Netherlands, where he was part of the KLM Management Group. In this capacity, he led commercial strategy, transformation initiatives, and regional operations, developing deep expertise in both traditional business models and the platform-era thinking now reshaping the sector. His unique background—combining aviation industry leadership, executive search expertise, and a tenure with the Special Forces Division of the Royal Dutch Army—positions him to identify leaders who can navigate the complex convergence of technology, operations, and customer experience.