Manager of Business Operations - Travel

Overview:

Our Culture and Impact

Cvent is a leading meetings, events, and hospitality technology provider with more than 6,000+ employees and 34,000+ customers worldwide, including 60% of the Fortune 500. Founded in 1999, Cvent delivers a comprehensive event marketing and management platform for marketers and event professionals and offers software solutions to hotels, special event venues and destinations to help them grow their group/MICE and corporate travel business. Our technology brings millions of people together at events around the world. In short, we’re transforming the meetings and events industry through innovative technology that powers the human connection.

Cvent's strength lies in its people, fostering a culture where everyone is encouraged to think like entrepreneurs, taking risks and making decisions confidently. We value diverse perspectives and celebrate differences, working together with colleagues and clients to build strong connections.

AI at Cvent: Leading the Future

Are you ready to shape the future of work at the intersection of human expertise and AI innovation? At Cvent, we’re committed to continuous learning and adaptation—AI isn’t just a tool for us, it’s part of our DNA. We’re looking for candidates who are eager to evolve alongside technology. If you love to experiment boldly, share your discoveries, and help define best practices for AI-augmented work, you’ll thrive here. Our team values professionals who thoughtfully integrate AI into their daily work, delivering exceptional results while relying on the human judgment and creativity that drive real innovation.

Throughout our interview process, you’ll have the chance to demonstrate how you use AI to learn, iterate, and amplify your impact. If you’re excited to be part of a team that’s leading the way in AI-powered collaboration, we’d love to meet you.

Cvent — the world's largest meetings and events technology company — is seeking a strategic and operationally advanced Manager of Business Operations, focused on continuously optimizing our Corporate Travel Program across a 6,000-person global workforce. This is not a maintenance role. It is a program-building opportunity for a travel professional who understands that a company of Cvent's scale and complexity demands more than a single transactional travel approach, it demands a thoughtfully segmented program in which each area of travel spend is understood on its own terms, optimized for its unique economics, and managed with the right tools, policies, and supplier relationships to match.

Cvent's travel portfolio spans meaningfully different segments — from client-funded field travel in our Professional Services division, to large-scale owned and partnered events, active sales travel, to standard inter-office movement, each carries its own cost structure and requirements.  The ability to recognize what makes each segment distinct, and to build the right program around those distinctions is central to success in this role.

You will provide strategic leadership to our India-based Travel Team while partnering cross-functionally with all departments, particularly, Finance to design, implement, and govern a travel program portfolio that reduces cost, improves the traveler experience, and drives measurable value across the business. Success in the role will be measured as much by what you rebuild as by what you run: rate competitiveness proven against the market, AI applied wherever it removes manual effort or sharpens decisions, local supplier and dining options negotiated so policy compliance is the easy path, and travel-related risk and other internal events are understood and insured appropriately.

In This Role, You Will:

Corporate Travel — Program Strategy & Development  Primary Focus

• Conduct a comprehensive assessment of Cvent's current travel landscape across all business segments, developing a clear understanding of the unique drivers, economics, and requirements of each.
• Design and implement the strategy for each the major travel areas to design a program to optimize how the preplanning strategy, approval workflows, and Concur configuration must be tailored to reflect the realities of different travel types, including client-reimbursed travel, event-driven travel, sales travel, and general corporate travel.
• Establish clear policy frameworks, guardrails, and traveler guidance for each segment — ensuring travelers understand what applies to their travel type and why.
• Build a unified view of total travel expenditures that enables segment-level analysis, identifies savings opportunities, and supports strategic supplier negotiations across air, hotel, ground, and TMC partnerships.
• Identify and deploy AI-enabled capabilities across the travel program — automated policy guidance for travelers, agentic booking and rebooking support, spend anomaly detection, and predictive demand modeling ahead of event and sales cycles — and build the business case for where AI replaces manual effort versus augments it.
• Benchmark negotiated air, hotel, ground, and TMC pricing against market and peer-set data on a defined cycle to confirm Cvent is buying at or below market — and that negotiated discounts are actually being realized at the point of sale rather than only on paper.

• Expand the rate and content sources available inside the managed channel — negotiated and direct rates alongside aggregator and OTA inventory such as Booking.com and Expedia — so travelers are never pushed off-channel to find a better price, and so Cvent retains visibility, duty-of-care coverage, and spend capture on every booking.
• Negotiate directly with individual hotels and restaurants in each Tier 1 Cvent office market to build a curated set of in-policy options — capped nightly rates, per-diem-compliant dining, and walkable proximity to the office — so travelers have genuinely good choices that keep them within policy by default rather than by enforcement.
• Serve as the travel point person for M&A activity — assessing the acquired company's travel program during diligence, then owning the integration plan that migrates travelers onto Cvent policy, booking tools, and preferred suppliers on a defined timeline, with duty-of-care coverage in place from day one.

Corporate Travel — Operations & Program Management

• Serve as the company's travel platform expert and system administrator, owning platform configuration, policy enforcement, reporting, and continuous improvement.
• Continuously tune the Concur travel booking experience — configuration, policy rules, content display, and traveler-facing usability — treating online booking adoption and channel compliance as tracked program KPIs rather than assumed outcomes.
• Lead, mentor, and provide day-to-day operational direction to a travel team and business entities to develop and standardize the requirements of success for each area.
• Drive resolution of outstanding travel issues through structured tracking, regular cadence with the India-based team, and clear escalation paths.
• Build and maintain dashboards and reporting to monitor program KPIs, track savings, measure policy compliance, and support executive visibility.
• Serve as the primary strategic and operational liaison to the Travel Manager and travel team in India, translating program strategy into clear daily direction.
• Apply AI to day-to-day travel operations — triaging traveler requests, drafting first-response traveler support, auto-auditing booking and expense exceptions, and generating recurring program reporting — and measure the cycle-time, accuracy, and cost impact of each deployment.

Procurement, Risk & Insurance

• Own particular segments of the purchasing and vendor management process for an assigned category of spend, around our meetings and events programs, ensuring compliance, supplier accountability, and total cost of ownership optimization that ties appropriately with the physical travel event programs.
• Manage TMC and other vendor relationships within scope, including contract governance and performance management.
• Hold the TMC accountable to contracted commitments through a defined performance scorecard and quarterly business reviews — agent response and abandonment times, booking accuracy, savings delivery, and guaranteed availability of the premium/executive desk and 24x7 traveler support — with remedies applied where service levels slip.
• Participate in annual global insurance renewals alongside Finance, Legal, and Treasury  — supplying travel, event, office and other asset information as well vendor exposure data that informs underwriting and supports favorable renewal terms.
• Identify coverage gaps across business travel, event cancellation, and third-party vendor risk, and recommend supplemental policies where existing corporate programs leave Cvent or its travelers exposed.
• Drive vendor synergy captured across acquisitions — mapping overlapping supplier contracts, consolidating volume onto the stronger agreement, renegotiating on combined spend, and exiting redundant contracts — with realized savings tracked and reported against the deal model

ESG

• Lead the company's responses to ESG-related inquiries, including RFPs, customer questionnaires, and regulatory submissions.
• Manage and maintain regular ESG reporting across customer-facing, internal, and regulatory channels.

Here's What You Need:

What You Bring

• 5+ years of corporate travel program management experience, with demonstrated experience designing or restructuring travel programs — not simply administering existing ones.
• Proven ability to work across a multi-segment travel environment and recognize that different areas of travel require different strategies, policies, and supplier approaches.
• Experience navigating travel programs that intersect with client billing, event operations, or sales activity, where cost recovery, lead time, and traveler flexibility vary significantly by segment.
• Executive level policy and travel management programs, ability to navigate and rescue individuals from travel related complexities that might occur at any time throughout their travel plans.
• Procurement or purchasing experience, with demonstrated vendor management capability including TMC management, hotel program negotiation, and air preferred program governance.
• Strong people management skills with experience leading remote and offshore teams.
• Project management discipline; able to manage multiple workstreams and deliver structured plans on schedule.
• Exceptional communication skills — equally capable of presenting strategy to leadership and providing clear direction to a travel agent.
• Strong negotiation skills and commercial acumen.
• Experience supporting M&A integration — onboarding acquired populations onto a corporate travel program and consolidating overlapping supplier contracts to capture synergy value.
• Demonstrated use of AI tools to improve program operations, analysis, or traveler support — with a bias toward piloting, measuring, and scaling what works.
• Working familiarity with travel and event risk and insurance concepts — business travel accident, event cancellation, and vendor liability coverage — and comfort contributing to renewal conversations.
• Working knowledge of ESG principles and reporting frameworks.
• Proficient in Microsoft Office Suite.
• Detail-oriented, deadline-driven, and comfortable operating with autonomy.