OTA Performance Manager

Position Overview

The OTA Performance Manager owns the visibility, integration health, and commercial performance of the vacation rental portfolio across major online travel agencies (OTAs), with a strong emphasis on Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Home2go, and Vacayhomeconnect. This role is responsible for ensuring every home is correctly connected to each channel, accurately listed, competitively positioned, and performing at its potential. It combines OTA operations, listing optimization, integration and fee auditing, competitive analysis, and platform defense, including preparing and winning Airbnb listing-removal appeals.

Success in the role is measured by channel revenue and occupancy, listing conversion and placement, clean integrations between the PMS and each OTA, and the number of homes protected from removal, suppression, or avoidable fee leakage. This is a data-driven, hands-on role for someone who understands how OTA algorithms, rate parity, and channel connections work accurately.

Core Objectives

• Keep every property correctly integrated and syncing cleanly between the PMS (Streamline) and all connected OTAs.
• Maximize listing visibility, placement, and conversion across Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com.
• Protect active inventory from suspension, delisting, and visibility suppression through fast, evidence-based appeals.
• Audit rates, fees, and channel costs that quietly erode home performance and owner returns.
• Identify and turn around underperforming homes using competitive data and listing improvements.

Key Responsibilities

OTA Integration & Integration Audits

• Own the connection between the property management system (Streamline) and every OTA channel, ensuring rates, availability, content, and reservations sync accurately and without errors.
• Run regular integration audits to catch broken mappings, stalled syncs, duplicated listings, missing properties, and reservations that import with incorrect rent, fees, or taxes.
• Verify that dynamic pricing and yielding flags are enabled and flow correctly to each channel, including secondary channels such as Booking.com, Vrbo, and Hopper, so no home is stuck on static rates.
• Coordinate with the PMS and channel-manager support teams to resolve connection issues quickly and document recurring failure points.

OTA Listing Optimization

• Audit and optimize listing titles, descriptions, photo order, captions, amenities, house rules, check-in instructions, and cancellation settings to improve conversion on each platform.
• Ensure listing content is accurate and matches the actual guest experience to reduce mismatched-expectation complaints and refund risk.
• Maintain consistent brand voice and factual accuracy across all OTAs while tailoring each listing to that platform's structure and audience.
• Coordinate with photography, marketing, and operations teams to refresh listings that are converting below their market potential.

Rates, Fees & Channel Cost Audits

• Audit the full fee stack on every OTA: commissions, service fees, cleaning-fee markups, and pass-through charges to find costs that suppress visibility, hurt conversion, or reduce owner returns.
• Monitor OTA rate parity and flag discrepancies that trigger placement penalties or ranking suppression.
• Review channel-level pricing rules and markups (including VHC and similar) for unauthorized or misconfigured fees on cleaning and reservation charges.
• Quantify how specific fees and rate settings affect each home's booking pace and net performance and recommend corrections.

Competitive Analysis (Comps) & Underperforming Homes

• Run competitive set analysis (comps) by market and property type to benchmark rates, occupancy, amenities, and placement against similar listings.
• Audit underperforming homes to diagnose whether the issue is pricing, content, placement, fees, integration, or review-driven, then build a specific recovery plan for each.
• Track booking velocity and pace against comparable homes to catch soft performance early rather than at the end of a season.
• Report clearly to owners and leadership on why a home is underperforming and what is being done to fix it.

OTA Placement & Visibility

• Actively manage each listing's placement and search ranking on Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com using the levers each platform rewards: response rate, acceptance, content completeness, pricing competitiveness, and review quality.
• Identify homes losing visibility and diagnose the cause, whether algorithmic, fee-related, or compliance-related.
• Test and monitor the impact of listing and pricing changes on placement and conversion.

Airbnb Listing-Removal Appeals & Platform Defense

• Take full ownership of Airbnb appeals when homes are threatened with removal, suspension, quality penalties, trust-and-safety restrictions, or visibility suppression.
• Review all OTA notices, reason codes, and account-health warnings to determine the exact basis for any enforcement action.
• Investigate each case using reservation history, guest messaging, maintenance and cleaning records, photos, invoices, and staff accounts, and build a clear evidence file with facts, timelines, and corrective actions.
• Draft structured written appeals that address the issue directly, present supporting evidence, and explain why the listing should be reinstated or the penalty reduced.
• Submit appeals through the proper channels, follow up persistently, maintain a case log with dates and case IDs, and keep leadership informed on risk status.
• Develop standardized appeal templates and playbooks for recurring scenarios, and track outcomes to recommend preventive measures that reduce future removals.

OTA Reviews

• Monitor guest reviews and ratings across all OTA channels and respond in a timely, professional, brand-aligned way.
• Identify reviews that violate platform policy extortion, discrimination, irrelevant content, or demonstrably false claims and submit removal requests where allowed, with documentation.
• Translate review trends into listing edits and operational fixes that improve ratings, placement, and booking confidence.

Vendor & Channel Partnerships

• Serve as the primary point of contact for OTA account managers, channel-manager providers, and integration vendors.
• Manage partnership terms, escalations, and new-feature rollouts, and evaluate fee changes or new agreements for their impact on portfolio performance.
• Build strong working relationships that get faster support, better placement opportunities, and early access to platform changes.

OTA Performance Reporting

• Build and maintain dashboards covering channel revenue, occupancy, ADR, conversion, placement, fee load, integration health, and appeal outcomes.
• Report weekly and monthly on OTA performance and channel-level risks, quantifying the business impact in revenue terms.
• Recommend prioritized action plans to improve visibility, conversion, and net performance across the portfolio.

Day-to-Day Activities

• Review channel sync status and integration alerts each morning.
• Update active Airbnb appeal files and follow up on pending cases.
• Audit listings with declining placement, soft booking pace, or conversion issues.
• Run comps on underperforming homes and adjust content, rates, or settings.
• Check fee and rate configurations across channels for leakage or parity issues.
• Respond to OTA reviews and coordinate with vendors and internal teams.
• Review any pending quotes for approval on Airbnb.
• Update listing quality from GS-reported discrepancies

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years in vacation rentals, OTA/channel account management, revenue operations, or a closely related field.
• Strong working knowledge of Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and channel-manager / PMS integrations (Streamline experience a plus).
• Demonstrated experience optimizing listings and improving OTA conversion or placement.
• Comfort with Monday.com for project management, dashboards, and pricing/comp tools such as PriceLabs.
• Strong analytical skills to connect fees, rates, and content changes to home performance.
• Clear, persuasive writing for appeals, vendor escalations, and owner reporting.
• Strong organization and the ability to manage multiple urgent cases at once.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience handling Airbnb listing suspensions, account-health issues, or formal appeals.
• Experience in a multi-property short-term rental management company.

Knowledge of STR compliance and permitting in regulated markets.

Understanding of OTA policies and procedures.

Key Performance Indicators

• Channel revenue, occupancy, and ADR across OTAs.
• Listing conversion and search placement on key platforms.
• Integration uptime and sync accuracy (error and mismatch rate).
• Fee leakage identified and recovered.
• Number of listing suspensions, removals, or visibility restrictions.
• Airbnb appeal submission speed and reinstatement/win rate.
• Turnaround results on audited underperforming homes.

Reporting Structure

This role reports to the Director of Owner Retention & Revenue Management (or equivalent) and works cross-functionally with revenue management, operations, guest services, marketing, and owner relations.

Short Version for Job Posting

The OTA Performance Manager owns OTA integrations, listing optimization, channel placement, and platform escalations for a vacation rental portfolio. This role keeps every home cleanly connected and accurately listed across Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com; audits rates, fees, and integrations that affect home performance; runs comps and turns around underperforming homes; manages OTA reviews and vendor partnerships; and leads Airbnb listing-removal appeals when homes are suspended, restricted, or removed. The goal is simple: maximize visibility, conversion, and net performance on every channel.