Manager, Guest Experience

JFK International Air Terminal LLC • New York, NY

5d • $110,000 - $130,000 • Onsite

About The Position

The Manager, Guest Experience is responsible for implementing the T4 service and hospitality standards across passenger-facing business partners. This role will also serve as a trainer and champion of the T4 State of Mind, JFKIAT’s hospitality initiative, ensuring that standards and behavioral traits are consistently applied across the employee, passenger, and commercial experience throughout the terminal.
This role operates at the intersection of the Customer Experience & Commercial and Operations teams, translating passenger journey insights into actionable strategies. It identifies trends and friction points, equipping frontline staff with the insights, training, and strategic direction needed to deliver a seamless, world-class terminal experience.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Hospitality Management, Business Administration, Aviation Management, Public Administration, or a closely related field, or equivalent professional experience
• 5 years of supervisory or management experience in a high-volume, premium service, or high-traffic environment (preferably at an airport, with an airline or other hospitality spaces such as hotels or full-service restaurants, retail flagships or large-scale entertainment venues).
• Demonstrated experience leading, training, and scheduling frontline, customer-facing service teams
• Must be able to pass a criminal background check and obtain and maintain federally mandated security clearances required to work at an airport.
• Understanding of customer journey mapping, touchpoint analysis, and service design.
• Familiarity with industry-standard satisfaction metrics used to evaluate customer and quality performance.
• Understanding of operational and service recovery techniques to turn a negative passenger experience into a positive one.
• Knowledge of how to monitor and enforce contract standards for third-party vendors.
• Knowledge of how to design and implement hospitality training programs for diverse, often high-turnover, frontline staff.
• Demonstrated expertise in hospitality and customer service excellence
• Strong operational and analytical capabilities
• Strong training facilitation skills with the ability to effectively deliver and lead engaging learning experiences
• Active learning: Understand the implications of new information for both current and future problem-solving and decision-making
• Active listening: Give full attention to what other people are saying, take time to understand the points being made, ask questions as appropriate, and not interrupt at inappropriate times
• Time management: Manage one’s own time or the time of others
• Coordination with others: Adjust actions in relation to others' actions
• Judgement and decision making: Consider the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively, build strong relationships, and establish trust with key stakeholders to influence outcomes.
• Team Leadership & Training: Ability to lead with agility and maintain a strong on-the-ground presence while setting and implementing clear, measurable service and hospitality standards, ensuring frontline teams are equipped with the tools to be knowledgeable on the terminal experience and support the passengers.
• Crisis Management: Ability to maintain a calm, decisive presence, think critically, and take effective action during irregular operations.
• Comprehend oral information: Listen to and understand information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences
• Speak: Communicate information and ideas in speaking so others will understand
• Comprehend written information: Read and understand information and ideas presented in writing
• Write: Communicate information and ideas in writing so others will understand
• Recognize problems: Tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong
• Reason to solve problems: Apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense
• Make sense of information: Quickly make sense of, combine, and organize information into meaningful patterns

Responsibilities

• Ensure terminal experience is consistent with Port Authority vision and manual as well as the terminal North Star vision.
• Engage with internal and external stakeholders in identifying priorities, tracking pain points, and developing remedial actions.
• Lead the "Embracing Accessibility" initiative, ensuring the terminal exceeds universal design and service standards, identify and track any accessibility gap(s), and promote a culture of accessibility across the terminal.
• Conduct monthly T4 State of Mind training sessions for T4 business partners, ensuring class attendance and engaging learning experiences.
• Supervise a team of 4 INFO personnel, fostering a high-performance culture focused on proactive guest assistance.
• Collaborate closely with Operations on T4 Services and frontline partners (including VIP Hospitality, SmarteCarte, and Travelers Aid) to ensure a seamless "one-team" approach, setting and measuring service standards.
• Oversee T4 Employee Experience reward and recognition program, including We Soar and 4 Excellence events, and additional opportunities through the new T4 Employee Platform.
• Develop a yearly action plan highlighting satisfaction levels, improvement opportunities, and targets for various passenger personas, based on ASQ and other research findings.
• Serve as primary Customer Experience & Commercial Team support for T4 Virtual Assistance function and manage T4-related customer complaints and feedback in collaboration with the Port Authority.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager