Senior Director, Guest Experience Design
Job Description
ABOUT AMAWATERWAYS
AmaWaterways is widely recognized as one of the world's most innovative and award-winning river cruise lines, offering extraordinary journeys through Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and beyond. Known for exceptional service, world-class cuisine, and an unwavering commitment to creating meaningful travel experiences, AmaWaterways sets the standard for luxury river cruising. As we look toward the next chapter of growth, we are investing in the future of the guest experience — elevating every touchpoint of the journey from inspiration to cherished memory.
POSITION SUMMARY
The Senior Director, Guest Experience Design is a newly created, visionary leadership role at the heart of AmaWaterways' product and brand evolution. Reporting directly to the Chief Creative & Marketing Officer and the Chief Operating Officer, this position is responsible for defining, designing, and continuously elevating the end-to-end guest experience across the entire AmaWaterways journey.
This is not a transactional role — it is a transformative one. The Senior Director will be the chief architect of what makes an AmaWaterways voyage unmistakably distinct: rich, immersive, locally rooted experiences that go far beyond the expected excursion. The successful candidate will challenge category conventions, build ownable platforms that cannot be replicated by competitors, and foster a culture of experience innovation that permeates every level of the organization.
This role requires an individual who blends the instincts of a creative storyteller with the rigor of a business strategist and the empathy of a seasoned hospitality leader. They will work across marketing, operations, interior design, and technology to bring a cohesive, guest-centered vision to life — before, during, and after every voyage.
THE OPPORTUNITY: REDEFINING RIVER CRUISING
The river cruise industry is at an inflection point. Guests — particularly new audiences — are seeking experiences that feel genuinely immersive, culturally authentic, and personally meaningful. They want to feel like insiders, not tourists. AmaWaterways has the ships, the team, the itineraries, and the brand equity to lead this shift — and the Senior Director of Guest Experience Design will be the catalyst. Beyond the on-board experience, a key part of a river cruise experience is ripe for disruption – crafting truly immersive, magical moments when discovering the cultures and experiences in each of the destinations we sail to.
This leader will answer a defining question for the brand:
"What is the AmaWaterways promise that no other river cruise company can make — and how does every single guest interaction deliver on it?"
The answer lies in a differentiated, ownable Guest Experience Architecture — a framework of signature moments, immersive destination programming, and seamless end-to-end service design that becomes the AmaWaterways competitive moat.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
1. Guest Experience Vision & Strategy
- Define and steward a compelling, long-term Guest Experience Vision that expresses the AmaWaterways brand at every touchpoint — from first discovery through post-voyage advocacy.
- Build and maintain a Guest Experience Architecture: a comprehensive map of the full guest journey with identified moments of truth, experience standards, and innovation opportunities.
- Establish AmaWaterways' unique value proposition in guest experience terms, clearly differentiating the brand from competitors in the river cruise and broader luxury travel sectors.
- Develop ownable, proprietary experience platforms — signature programming concepts, guest rituals, and service hallmarks — that are intrinsic to AmaWaterways and difficult to replicate.
2. Destination & Immersive Experience Design
- Reimagine how guests discover and connect with destinations by developing a portfolio of immersive, culturally rich experiences that go well beyond traditional guided excursions.
- Build frameworks for locally embedded programming: partnerships with local artisans, historians, chefs, musicians, farmers, and community organizations that create authentic points of access unavailable to standard travelers.
- Develop tiered experience offerings (active, cultural, culinary, reflective) that serve diverse guest personas, travel motivations, and ability levels — all united by a common thread of genuine discovery.
- Champion storytelling as an experience layer: how destination knowledge, cultural context, and personal narrative are woven into every onboard and onshore touchpoint.
- Ensure AmaWaterways experiences are not just memorable to guests but meaningful — creating emotional resonance that drives loyalty and word-of-mouth advocacy.
3. End-to-End Guest Journey Design (Pre, During & Post-Cruise)
- Map and continuously optimize the full guest journey across all phases:
- Pre-cruise: Booking experience, pre-departure communications, personalization, anticipation-building, and digital engagement.
- Onboard: Arrival experience, cabin environment, dining, programming, entertainment, crew interaction, and service recovery.
- Onshore: Excursion design, destination integration, logistics, and the transitions between ship and shore.
- Post-cruise: Follow-up communications, loyalty cultivation, review engagement, and community-building.
- Partner closely with Operations leadership to ensure that experience design is operationally executable, consistently delivered, and scalable across the fleet.
- Establish guest experience standards, service rituals, and quality benchmarks that are embedded into crew training and operational protocols.
- Implement measurement frameworks (NPS, qualitative feedback, journey analytics) to track experience performance and inform continuous improvement.
4. Product Innovation & Differentiation
- Act as a primary voice for the guest in product development discussions, ensuring new itineraries, ship designs, amenities, and service offerings are designed with the guest experience at the center.
- Identify and develop new experience categories, programming concepts, and service innovations that extend AmaWaterways' differentiation and open new market opportunities.
- Monitor trends in luxury travel, hospitality design, wellness, culinary experiences, cultural tourism, and technology to identify emerging guest expectations and proactively shape the AmaWaterways product pipeline.
- Collaborate with the marketing team to ensure experience innovations are effectively communicated and become compelling brand narratives in all consumer-facing channels.
5. Cross-Functional Leadership & Organizational Change
- Serve as an enterprise-wide experience design advocate — embedding a guest-centric mindset into departments across the organization, including Operations, Sales, Marketing, People Ops, and IT.
- Lead and influence cross-functional experience design initiatives, building coalitions across teams to drive change without always having direct authority.
- Develop internal education and communication programs that engage employees — particularly shipboard crew — in understanding, internalizing, and delivering the AmaWaterways experience vision.
- Report regularly to the Chief Creative & Marketing Officer and Chief Operating Officer on experience strategy, innovation pipeline, and performance metrics.
- Build and manage a high-performing Guest Experience Design team, with clear roles across research, journey design, programming, and measurement.
6. Guest Insights & Research
- Build robust guest research capabilities: qualitative interviews, journey shadowing, onboard ethnographic observation, and quantitative feedback systems.
- Translate guest insights, competitive intelligence, and industry trend data into actionable design decisions and innovation priorities.
- Develop guest personas, segmentation frameworks, and journey maps that inform both product design and marketing strategy.
- Partner with the sales and CRM teams to use guest data to inform personalization strategies across the journey.
QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE
Required
- 12+ years of progressive experience in experience design, product design, brand strategy, or hospitality/travel leadership — with a demonstrable record of defining and executing guest experience transformation.
- Deep expertise in customer journey mapping, service design methodology, and human-centered design thinking.
- Proven ability to conceptualize and operationalize differentiated, ownable consumer experience platforms — from strategic framework through execution and measurement.
- Experience in the travel, hospitality, luxury lifestyle, or entertainment sectors, with a genuine passion for cultural travel and immersive destination experiences.
- Strong cross-functional leadership skills with the ability to influence without authority and build alignment across diverse stakeholder groups.
- Executive-level communication and storytelling ability — skilled at inspiring leadership teams, boards, and internal audiences with a compelling experience vision.
- Familiarity with consumer research methodologies, guest feedback systems, and the use of data to inform design and prioritization decisions.
- Experience managing and developing teams, with a coaching-forward leadership style.
Preferred
- Direct experience with experience-centric brand, luxury and/or lifestyle hospitality
- Background in cultural programming, destination content, or travel curation.
- Experience in or alongside brand marketing, with an understanding of how experience design and brand narrative reinforce one another.
- Familiarity with digital experience design and the use of technology to personalize and enhance the pre- and post-cruise guest journey.
- International work experience or extended living abroad, with fluency in navigating cross-cultural contexts.
- Multi-lingual capabilities are a plus, particularly in languages relevant to AmaWaterways sailing regions (German, French, Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese).
LEADERSHIP PROFILE
The ideal candidate will exemplify the following:
- Visionary with Operational Fluency
Able to think boldly about the future of travel while understanding the constraints and realities of running a world-class cruise operation. - Guest Obsessed
Deeply empathetic to the needs, desires, and emotions of guests across diverse demographics, travel styles, and cultural backgrounds. - Culturally Curious
An authentic love of travel, history, food, language, and human connection; someone who experiences the world with genuine wonder. - Collaborative Changemaker
Able to drive meaningful organizational change through persuasion, coalition-building, and inspiring others rather than mandating from above. - Storyteller
Communicates with clarity, warmth, and conviction; able to make the abstract tangible and the complex compelling. - Commercially Aware
Understands that exceptional guest experience drives bookings, loyalty, and advocacy — and keeps business outcomes in clear view alongside creative ambitions. - Humble & Hungry
Combines the confidence to lead with the curiosity to keep learning; energized by the challenge of building something genuinely new.