About this role
Position Overview
This position will build the connection between a differentiated guest experience, the right external partners, and meaningful earned attention to create an Experience Partnership PR flywheel meant to strengthen brand relevance, reputation, and business performance.
The Director, PR & Partnerships will develop a portfolio-wide strategy while remaining capable of taking major partnerships and activations from initial idea through negotiation, launch, amplification, and measurement. This role welcomes a hospitality marketer who understands culture, programming, collaboration, operational integration, and what makes a property or experience genuinely worth covering.
This person will work as a peer to the Creative Director, Brand, with both roles reporting directly to the SVP, Marketing. The Creative Director shapes the brand and experience; the Director, PR & Partnerships builds the external relationships, programs, and earned media around it.
Key Responsibilities
Earned Media and Reputation Strategy
- Develop and lead an earned-media strategy across the EOS Hospitality portfolio, connecting property positioning, business priorities, cultural relevance, programming, partnerships, and newsworthy moments.
- Partner with Marketing Directors and leaders across the organization to build a proactive story pipeline across hotels, restaurants, destinations, team, new concepts, partnerships, and guest experiences. Marketing Directors will maintain day-to-day oversight of their hotel PR, laddering up to the strategy developed by the Director, PR & Partnerships.
- Oversee announcements around new transitions and other key EOS Corporate initiatives.
- Maintain strong relationships with relevant travel, hospitality, F&B, lifestyle, design media.
- Define success beyond placement volume, focusing on quality, authority, and relevance.
- Use credible, independent coverage to provide authoritative third-party validation of EOS brands and strengthen visibility across traditional and emerging discovery channels.
- Partner with Digital and property Marketing teams to ensure partnerships and earned media coverage are leveraged as content across owned channels.
Strategic Partnerships
- Identify, cultivate, negotiate, and manage partnerships that advance property and portfolio business priorities, expand audience reach, and reinforce brand positioning.
- Build a tentpole partnership and events strategy that develops opportunities spanning two or more properties or markets.
- Set the property-level partnership framework, and support high-value local partnerships as needed.
- Build relationships with complementary brands, creators, cultural organizations, chefs, community partners, and other relevant collaborators.
- Evaluate potential partners based on brand fit, audience relevance, operational feasibility, content value, earned-media potential, commercial value, and ability to enhance the guest experience. Audit existing EOS Hospitality partners for activation consideration.
- Lead major partnerships end to end, including concept development, outreach, pitch, negotiation, deliverables, activation planning, amplification, and post-program evaluation.
- Establish clear handoff expectations so property teams own last-mile execution and sustained adoption after a recurring program or partnership has been launched.
Agency and External Partner Leadership
- Serve as the senior EOS relationship owner for PR agencies, strategic partners, and activation resources. Lead agency performance reviews where appropriate.
- Establish agency scopes, standards, ways of working, priorities, reporting expectations, and performance measures across the portfolio.
- Lead major story development, senior leadership media opportunities, portfolio and employer positioning.
- Determine when external activation support is needed, and create a bench of partners.
- Note: Property Marketing Pods continue to manage routine property-level agency workflow, local inputs, approvals, and day-to-day hotel priorities.
Experience and Capabilities
- Approximately 10 or more years of progressive experience across public relations, strategic partnerships, brand marketing, programming, experiential marketing, or related disciplines.
- Strong background in hospitality, restaurants, luxury lifestyle, travel, experiential retail, entertainment, culture, or another experience-led consumer category.
- Established network of compatible media, brand, cultural, and partnership relationships, with the ability to expand that network on behalf of EOS.
- Demonstrated ability to develop and execute partnerships, activations, or programs from initial concept through launch and measurement.
- Strong understanding of what creates a credible media story and how earned media, partnerships, programming, content, and guest experience work together.
- Experience managing PR agencies, partnership negotiations, budgets, deliverables, timelines, and multiple senior stakeholders.
- Commercially minded, with the ability to connect reputation and cultural relevance to portfolio and property business priorities.
- Strong communicator and presenter who can represent EOS confidently with owners, executives, media, agencies, partners, and property leadership.
- Deep understanding of property realities and operational needs. A true partner to the field.
- Highly organized, proactive, collaborative, and comfortable moving between strategic planning and hands-on execution.
- Willing and able to travel regularly to properties, activations, and relevant industry events.
The annual salary for this position is $145,000 to $165,000