Spotahome recruits Amanda Symonds as CGO

London: Spotahome has appointed Amanda Symonds as its chief growth officer following a seven-year stint establishing and growing vacation rentals at TripAdvisor.

The appointment makes her the first executive to have joined the new C-Suite team from a property rental marketplace background.

TripAdvisor’s former VP of Vacation Rental Marketing aims to drive top-line growth across all marketing channels globally by building out the team, processes and data-driven pipelines to get more bookings.

The newly-formed Growth division will comprise of leaders and experts in paid marketing channels such as SEM, Display, Social and Affiliates, and organic marketing channels including SEO, CRM, Product Marketing and Brand, as well as dedicated designers, copywriters, engineers, data scientists and data analysts.

Symonds joined TripAdvisor in 2010 prior to its initial public offering and worked with the senior leadership team to build a global vacation rentals strategy following the acquisition of Holiday Lettings (UK) and FlipKey (USA).

After moving up the ranks to head of traffic, she took a seat on the Vacation Rentals Group leadership team, and delivered triple-digit annual growth in sessions from cross-site pages, SEO and CRM. At TripAdvisor, she grew the team to 40 growth marketers with dedicated growth engineering.

Spotahome CEO and co-founder, Alejandro Artacho, said: “We set the bar high for this role to the extent we felt we may not find someone who would fit the bill – as chief growth officer we needed to reflect the strong alignment between growth marketing and product which requires understanding data, technical development and brand.

“At TripAdvisor, Amanda’s role focused on strategic vision and building a growth marketing team from scratch, positioning TripAdvisor Vacation Rentals as one of the leaders in the market in an increasingly competitive sector. She has the know-how and ambition to work with the rest of the C-Suite to scale Spotahome quickly with a growth hacking mentality that complements the rest of the team,” he added.

Chief growth officer Amanda Symonds said: “I’m thrilled to join an ambitious, talented and diverse team with a clear mission and some serious financial backing. There’s a huge opportunity to make a real and lasting difference to the way people list and find homes.

“Spotahome is building an innovative platform that for the first time allows tenants to view the property, see reviews and do the entire transaction online for long-term rentals. It’s a revolutionary shift in behaviour for both property owners and tenants that we are focused on solving, which makes it a really exciting time for the entire property market,” she added.

Her first mission at Spotahome is to exponentially grow the existing marketing team. With recruitment underway to grow the team to more than 50 people, Symonds is already creating processes to firmly embed a growth-hacking, data-driven mindset.

She said: “I have a vision to scale the growth marketing team by five times in the next year, while working on some quick wins and high priority projects to build awareness and increase bookings.”

Spotahome is seeking to reinvent how the long-term rental sector does business and measures market effectiveness by focusing on the key digital performance indicators around the customer journey. The PropTech firm announced plans to grow its workforce by almost 100 per cent this year following the opening of its global hub in London in March, making use of its $40m Series B funding raised in 2018.

The hiring follows three recent C-Level appointments, including former UBER EMEA operations director Cleo Sham as COO, former Amazon executive Balaji Nageswaran as CPO and former Amazon search director Angel Azcarraga as CTO. The firm now needs to complete its C-Suite lineup with only the roles of chief human resources officer and chief finance officer left vacant.

Symonds is originally from Bury in Lancashire and holds a BSC in Mathematics and an MBA from MIT Sloan.

For more information on the appointment, visit the Spotahome website here.