Director of Tour Operations

Job Description

About the role

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 Operations, reporting directly to the founders, to own how our tours run. You’ll own the tour P&L, vendor contracts, readiness milestones, on-the-ground logistics, and the team and systems behind every guest’s week in Italy.

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.

Who we’re looking for

We don’t care which industry you come from.

You might be:

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• A consultant who has redesigned how organizations run and is ready to own the outcome instead of advising on it
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• A finance or strategy professional who wants to run operations, not just model them
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• An operations leader from hospitality, events, e-commerce, logistics, tech, or anywhere else where execution is everything
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• A founder who has built and run a company
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Travel experience is a bonus, not a requirement. What matters is that you’ve proven you can take something complex and make it run flawlessly, and that you take full ownership of the results.

What you’ll do

Own the tour P&L

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• Build the budget for every departure and deliver against our gross margin targets
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• Control vendor costs, manage payment schedules across currencies, and spot margin risk before it lands
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• Report on tour profitability, cost trends, and where we’re leaving money on the table
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Lead tour delivery end-to-end

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

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• Lead and develop our current operations team, who handle vendor logistics, guest communications, and payments
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• Hire tour managers and coordinators, and give each of them clear ownership of part of the operation
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• Set the standard for how the team works, and hold it
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Build the operating system

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

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• Establish and maintain relationships with hotels, restaurants, guides, drivers, and experience providers across multiple Italian regions
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• Negotiate contracts and lock rates well in advance
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• Line up backups for every critical partner, so a closed restaurant or a cancelled driver never breaks a guest’s day
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What success looks like after 12 months

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• Every departure runs on your readiness system, and the founders are no longer on day-to-day ops calls
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• Tours hit their margin targets, and you know why when one doesn’t
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• Every region we run has a written playbook good enough for a new coordinator to run a departure from it
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• Every critical vendor has a confirmed backup
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• Your team owns clear parts of the operation and is getting better without you in the room
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• Next season’s vendor contracts are locked early
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What we’d like to see

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• 6+ years of experience with a record of results you can prove
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• A track record of winning: you’ve been promoted fast, given more than your title, or taken something from broken to excellent, and you can show us the numbers
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• Experience leading a team: hiring, developing, and holding people to a high standard
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• Experience owning a budget, a P&L, or financial outcomes you can walk us through
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• Proven system-builder: you can show us a process you designed and handed off so completely that it survived your absence
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• Experience negotiating with vendors, partners, or clients
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• Obsessive attention to detail and a steady hand under pressure. Our guests have waited years for this week, and it has to be flawless.
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• Excellent written communication
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• Self-directed and comfortable owning outcomes without daily oversight
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• Able to travel to Italy 2–4 times a year, for 1–2 weeks each, during tour seasons
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Bonus qualifications

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• Experience in travel, hospitality, or events
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• Experience scaling a fast-growing small company, or founding one
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• Experience with international vendors or multi-currency operations
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Reasons not to take this job

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• You want a big department under you. We’re a small team: you’ll lead people, and you’ll still roll up your sleeves in peak season. There’s no travel desk, legal team, or finance group behind you.
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• You want to stay in a narrow lane. This role spans operations, people, and the tour P&L.
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• You’re only willing to do the bare minimum. Peak seasons are intense, with multiple departures running close together.
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• You’d rather not be held to a high bar. Our guests expect excellence, and so do we.
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• You want to run systems someone else built. Here, you’ll be building them.
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• You’re here for the travel perks. The job is delivering a magical week for our guests. Time in Italy is a perk of the job, not the reason for it.
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Compensation & benefits

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• Base salary of $105–125K depending on experience
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• Fully remote
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• Health benefits
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• Paid time off, plus company holidays
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• Work laptop and home-office setup, on us
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• Coworking space reimbursement
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• Travel to Italy during tour seasons, fully covered
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• A front-row seat to building a category-defining company
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