Category Manager - Hotels

Launched in 2007 by Aloke Bajpai & Rajnish Kumar, ixigo (Le Travenues Technology Limited) is a technology company focused on empowering Indian travellers to plan, book and manage their trips across rail, air, buses and hotels. ixigo assists travellers in making smarter travel decisions by leveraging artificial intelligence. The ixigo, ConfirmTkt and AbhiBus apps allow travellers to book train tickets, flight tickets, bus tickets, hotels, and cabs, and provide travel utility tools and services developed using in-house proprietary algorithms and crowd-sourced information. With over 54 crore Annual Active Users in Fiscal 2025, ixigo is the leading OTA for Next Billion Users in India. For more information, please visit http://www.ixigo.com

About the Role

We are looking for an entrepreneurial and data-savvy Category Manager – Hotels to join our high-performing Growth Team. This role will be key in scaling ixigo’s Hotels vertical by identifying growth opportunities, optimizing category performance, and driving measurable business impact through data, experimentation, and deep customer understanding.

In this role, you are expected to own the growth strategy for the Hotels category—working on expansion, pricing, and product-market fit across user segments and geographies, whilst driving the P&L and the end-to-end performance of hotel supply & demand. You will operate at the intersection of business, product, and marketing—owning high-impact initiatives that directly influence key metrics like conversions, revenue, retention, and margins.

What You Will Do

• Drive Category Growth: Own the key growth metrics: Attachment Rate (Train-to-Hotel cross-sell), New User Acquisition, and Conversion Rate. Identify category growth levers through user behavior analysis, funnel diagnostics, A/B experimentation, and competitor benchmarking.

• Crack the Cross-Sell: Deeply understand the behavior of the Tier 2/Tier 3 train traveler. Design specific pricing, bundling, and merchandising strategies to make booking a hotel an automatic "next step" after booking a train.

• Funnel Optimization: Analyze the user journey from "Search" to "Payment." Identify drop-off points and work with Product teams to run A/B tests that improve conversion.

• Campaign Management: Collaborate with the Marketing team to run tactical campaigns (e.g., flash sales, seasonal offers) that drive sudden spikes in demand.

• Supply Feedback Loop: You represent the demand side. You will guide the Supply team on what to source based on user search data 

• Pricing Strategy: Implement dynamic pricing and couponing to maximize GMV while controlling Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

• Drive internal synergies: Collaborate with Product, Marketing, and Tech teams to optimize end-to-end user journeys for hotel discovery, booking, and post-booking experiences.

• Conceptualize and execute growth experiments: Understand consumer insights, travel trends, seasonality, and user demand shifts to envision and drive growth campaigns and GTM strategies.

• Analytics & Insights: Analyze search-to-book funnel, price competitiveness, and demand trends

• Growth orientation: Identify destination and segment growth opportunities

• Report making: Build reporting for category performance and partner contribution

 

Desired Skills & Experience:

• 10–12 years of experience in growth, category management, business strategy, or performance marketing—preferably in travel tech, consumer internet, or marketplace platforms.

• Strong analytical and critical thinking skills; comfort working with numbers, dashboards, and tools like Excel, Google Sheets, and BI platforms. (SQL knowledge is a bonus.) coupled with a strong analytical and commercial orientation.

• Important to possess Advanced Excel / SQL / data analysis capabilities Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives with measurable impact on growth KPIs (e.g., conversion rate, CAC, GMV).

• Experience with pricing, deals, or supply-side roles preferred.

• Excellent stakeholder and partner management skills

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills; experience working with product, marketing, and supply teams is highly desirable.

• Self-driven, creative, and structured thinker with a bias for action and experimentation.

• Familiarity with hotel supply or OTA platforms is desired.

Responsible for safeguarding sensitive company data against unauthorized access, use, or disclosure, and for reporting any suspected security incidents in line with the organization's ISMS (Information Security Management System) policies and procedures.