Client Services Manager

Job Description

Client Service Manager

Band: $70,000 Base + Commission Structure

Reports to: Head of Client Services

Employment: Full-time · Salaried · Remote, United States

About Luminary

Luminary is a lean, fast-moving travel firm operating for a small, highly demanding client base worldwide. We build bespoke itineraries from the ground up — private villas, complex multi-stop routes, and logistics where off-the-shelf options don't work. We don't use templates or canned recommendations, which means the work is detail-heavy, research-intensive, and rarely routine.

We operate with high standards and a flat structure. Everyone on the team shares a direct responsibility for client outcomes, and success here comes down to rigorous organization, clear communication, and a genuine interest in getting the details right under real-world timing pressures.

The Role

Luminary designs and operates travel for a small book of highly discerning clients. As a Client Service Manager, you own a book of those clients end to end — the relationship and the trips inside it.

The work splits evenly. Half is the relationship: you are Luminary to your clients, from the first conversation through the last night of a trip and into planning the next one. Half the work is the trip building: you research, design, produce, and run the itineraries yourself. Neither half is delegated to someone else and handed to you.

You also direct a Pod — Operations, Flight, and the Concierge team within Operations. You set the cadence, delegate execution, and hold the vendor relationships for quoting and invoicing.

The founder’s practice reaches into these pods. The Challenges section below describes how.

A CSM client book typically contains 30 to 50 clients or client families. Client families do not sit in a separate category, but they may require more time per account than individual clients.

The Work

Client Relationship

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• Own the client relationship end-to-end. You are the point of contact, and the client’s read on Luminary is their read on you.
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• Set expectations at the start of an engagement and hold them through revision.
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• Absorb escalations. When a trip breaks — a cancellation, closure, a lost dining reservation, or a room product that doesn’t match what was sold — the recovery is yours to run and communicate.
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• Carry the relationship between trips, not only during them.
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Trip Design and Build

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• Build end-to-end itineraries: research, sourcing, sequencing, pricing, and booking (with support from Ops), and client-facing documentation.
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• Run several trips concurrently at different stages of build and travel.
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• Turn revisions around on short notice without letting detail slip on the trips you aren’t currently looking at. This is the failure mode the seat is most regularly exposed to.
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Pod Direction

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• Direct and delegate to Operations, including Flight and the Concierge team (approximately 6-8 rotating team members out of a department of 20).
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• Run daily and weekly check-ins for your pod and hold the schedule.
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• Liaise with vendors on quoting and invoicing.
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Record and Visibility

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• Salesforce is the system of record for clients and trips. It is the only CRM. There are no parallel records and no spreadsheet workaround; what you keep there is what the rest of the company sees.
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• The working stacks beyond that: Notion, Axus for itineraries, Front, Slack, Google Workspace, Claude, and a few proprietary tools. Slack is an operating channel, not a notification feed.
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The Challenges

1. You own the relationship. You don’t own it exclusively.

Luminary’s founder routinely enters trips into these pods, at a cadence no one can predict — a conversation with the client, a commitment, a direction that reshapes an itinerary already in production. 

Your clients usually won’t know that the founder has given input on their trips. Those clients will experience it as though you iterated, because the continuity is yours to maintain.  Often, you’ll find out what was said, incorporate it into the plan, and keep the trip whole. Candidates who need clean lines of authority to do their best work struggle here. Candidates who can carry ownership without exclusive control do well.

2. Some of this happens outside working hours, and no one can tell you how much.

Our clients revise plans at short notice, most often because they’re (literally) in motion, and some of that work falls in the evening or on weekends. The role requires it. What no one can specify is how much or when. The need is real, and the level is unresolved — which is a different thing from saying it’s unlimited.

Escalation channels and the Concierge team are in place. Beyond that, CSMs improvise in varied ways, and how much you absorb versus push back on is, to a real degree, something you negotiate as the need arises. 

The unfiltered description of what we’re looking for: willing, able, and tolerant of negotiating your availability outside standard hours as those needs come up. Being unavailable on a given night does not qualify as a dereliction of duty. However, it is the single most common thing CSMs push back on the founder about, and you should expect to be one of them.

3. You have authority over your process. A trip inside it can be reshaped in any way.

You’ll run your pod within a set of broad SOPs, and within that framework, how the pod operates is up to you to define. That’s real latitude. It also sits in direct tension with the first challenge: a trip built by your process can be reshaped from above without notice, and you carry the outcome. 

We’re not going to resolve that contradiction in a job description, because it isn’t resolved in the company. The Head of Client Services sits between you and the founder and absorbs part of it. The rest is yours. Separately, processes across the company change more often than they would at a larger firm; you’re not being hired to restructure it, so the ground will move under you while you work.

Experience and Skillset

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• Luxury client service experience is preferred — travel or otherwise. What matters is that you’ve carried named clients with high expectations rather than a queue.
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• Luxury travel experience is welcome but not required. Luminary’s approach to its clients is its own, and candidates arriving from other travel firms have historically spent time unlearning before they could work at speed.
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• Direct ownership of client relationships end-to-end, including complex communication across multiple channels.
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• Demonstrated ability to hold detail across concurrent projects that revise on short notice.
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• Comfortable directing an internal team and coordinating with outside suppliers to meet a deadline.
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• Autonomy. While this role comes with close supervision at times, it isn’t a position where waiting for direction is a safe default.
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Two factors weigh the heaviest, and we screen hardest on them. The first is a genuine client-service ethos — owning outcomes and meeting the wants of a clientele with highly specific expectations.  Second is diligent attention to detail across concurrent trips under quick-turnaround pressure. Strength elsewhere does not compensate for weakness in either.