Category Manager - Hills/Spiritual

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 (₹1000–1500)

● Treebo and Treebo Premium (₹1500–3000)

● Medalio, our newly launched affordable luxury brand (₹3000–6000 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 that

drives 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 at

sold-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

● 4–8 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 by

cluster

● A knowledge base documenting the specific factors that separate top- and

bottom-performing Hill hotels, with evidence behind each claim

● At least 2–3 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