Category Commercial Manager - Hills

About the company

Treebo Hospitality Ventures (THV) is a hotel group operating with a mission of "democratising the joy of travel". We focus on the affordable segments of the market economy to mid-market to cater to the next 100 million travellers who will experience the joy of travel over the next 10 years. We offer these guests a high-quality experience at an affordable price point, with a portfolio of 800+ hotels across 120+ cities.

We operate through multiple brands catering to different sub-segments:

Itsy (10001500)

Treebo and Treebo Premium (15003000)

Medalio, our newly launched affordable luxury brand (30006000 per night)

We are the most loved hotel chain in the affordable segment, with an average rating of 7.8/10

across independent review platforms and we are just getting started

About the role

The Category Commercial Manager Hills is the category's chief strategist: the person who figures out what actually makes a hill-station hotel perform, codifies it into a playbook, and builds the knowledge base that lets the rest of the organization act on it consistently. This role is less about running any single lever day-to-day and more about answering the "why" behind performance which factors separate a top-performing hill hotel from a struggling one and turning that answer into a repeatable, scalable set of actions. Pricing execution sits with the central Revenue Management pricing team. Everything else thatdrives hill-hotel performance demand patterns, inventory strategy, positioning, marketing,and policy is this role's to understand, document, and turn into playbook guidance, working closely with the teams who execute against it.This is a high-visibility, senior individual-contributor role reporting into commercial leadership,with regular exposure to QBR and senior management reviews.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Playbook Creation (core mandate)

Diagnose what drives performance in the hills category pull apart top-performing vs.underperforming hotels within each cluster (Chikmagalur, Coorg, Ooty, Shimla, Manali,etc.) and identify the specific, repeatable factors behind the gap

Translate those findings into a living Hills Category Playbook: a structured, prioritized set of "what to do" actions by cluster, by season, by hotel maturity covering everything from listing content to demand planning to promotions

Continuously test and refine the playbook: treat each intervention (a pricing change, a

new cancellation policy, a promotion) as an experiment, and feed results back into the playbook rather than treating it as one-off

Own the category's knowledge base a single source of truth documenting what works, what doesn't, and why, so that the logic doesn't live only in one person's head and can be handed off, audited, and built on

Build decision frameworks (e.g., "when a hotel's occupancy drops below X in season Y, do Z") that let revenue management, marketing, and ops teams act on the playbook without needing this role in every conversation

Benchmark the hills category against comp sets and against Treebo's other categories (city, business) to pressure-test which "hills-specific" factors are truly unique to the category Revenue Management (beyond pricing) as playbook inputs

Study demand seasonality by destination (long weekends, festival calendars, school holidays, wedding/honeymoon seasons) and turn it into a demand-planning framework the category can reuse year over year

Define the category's point of view on inventory and availability strategy length-of-stay controls, minimum-stay/blackout dates, stop-sells, and overbooking approach at high-demand properties and document it in the playbook

Define the category's channel mix and distribution strategy, and the market/segment

strategy (corporate vs. leisure vs. drive-in) by cluster and season

Partner with the central pricing team on rate-uplift opportunities (e.g., properties priced below comp set despite equal or better review scores), feeding them the category insight behind each opportunity

Investigate root causes behind Critical No-Show % and other NBV-leakage patterns asold-out properties, and codify the intervention playbook (ACQ or otherwise) Marketing as playbook inputs

Determine what marketing actually moves the needle for hill destinations content quality, listing photography, promotions, campaigns and document what works by cluster and season

Build the playbook for OTA visibility and content marketing (listing standards,

ranking/boost programs) in coordination with the Listing Intelligence workstream

Design and run promotion/campaign experiments tied to seasonality, and record which formats and offers actually lift occupancy and RevPAR

Track marketing-driven demand signals (e.g., hotel detail view traffic by platform) to figure out where marketing effort pays off, and build that into the knowledge base Policy as playbook inputs

Determine the right cancellation, refund, and no-show policy stance for the category,

and document the reasoning and trade-offs (guest flexibility vs. NBV protection)

Define the category's position on rate parity, minimum-stay, blackout, and

booking-window policy for peak-season dates

Ensure category-level policy recommendations account for OTA platform requirements and Treebo's broader commercial policy framework

Competitive & Market Intelligence

Track ARI (Average Rate Index) and Review Index against comp sets for each cluster

Turn competitive patterns into playbook guidance e.g., what a competitor is doing

that consistently correlates with better performance, and whether it's worth adopting

Portfolio & P&L Management

Own the regional P&L narrative for the hills category revenue, cost-to-serve, and NBV

and present waterfall/variance analysis in QBRs, tying performance back to playbook

adoption

Prioritize which playbook interventions to push into which hotels, based on

impact-to-effort

Partner with acquisition/onboarding teams to apply category learnings to new hotel

signings in high-potential hill destinations

Cross-functional Execution

Work closely with central Pricing, Distribution, Marketing, OTA/Listing, Operations, and

Category teams both to gather the inputs the playbook needs and to get playbook

guidance actually adopted

Represent the hills category in AMJ/quarterly business reviews own the narrative,

data, and playbook evolution

Maintain the knowledge base and playbook as living documents, versioned and updated as new evidence comes in

What We're Looking For

48 years of experience in revenue management, commercial strategy, or program management in hospitality/ travel, or a marketplace/platform business preferred

Strong analytical instincts: comfortable moving from raw performance data to "here's the underlying reason" rather than stopping at the dashboard

Demonstrated experience building frameworks, playbooks, or SOPs that other teams adopted and used not just one-off analyses

Strong quantitative fluency: comfortable working with RevPAR, ARR, NBV, occupancy, and P&L waterfalls without hand-holding

Working knowledge of revenue management levers beyond pricing, OTA distribution dynamics, and hospitality marketing/policy enough to know what questions to ask, even without owning execution of each

Demonstrated ability to translate data into a clear commercial narrative for senior stakeholders

Advanced Excel/Sheets skills; comfort with dashboards (Mixpanel or similar) is a plus

Willingness to travel periodically to hill-station clusters to validate playbook assumptions on the ground

Curious and rigorous by disposition treats every intervention as something to be tested and documented, not just executed

What Success Looks Like (First 2 Quarters)

A first version of the Hills Category Playbook live and shared with commercial leadership, covering demand planning, inventory strategy, marketing, and policy bycluster

A knowledge base documenting the specific factors that separate top- and bottom-performing Hill hotels, with evidence behind each claim

At least 23 playbook recommendations piloted with a measurable before/after read (e.g., a promotion format, a policy change, a listing fix)

A repeatable, cluster-level QBR reporting structure adopted by commercial leadership,framed around playbook adoption and impact