James Waters

As Booking.com’s Senior Vice President of Accommodations, James Waters is responsible for the growth and strategy of the company’s largest core business unit, including its product, UX and customer insights teams. Within this role he also oversees Booking.com’s Customer Service and global Partner Services organizations. James brings extensive commercial operations, product development, strategy, marketing and customer experience expertise, which support the company’s efforts to deliver a great product to all types of accommodation providers and a world-class product and customer service experience to travelers.

Previously, James served as the Senior Vice President of Commercial Operations, leading over 10,000 employees worldwide and ensuring the company continued to build and maintain valuable relationships with Booking.com’s partners and customers in every corner of the globe. He also served as the Vice President of Customer Service, where he oversaw the continued integration of Booking.com’s global workforce of highly trained customer experience agents with technology and innovation to achieve the company’s goal of striking a perfect balance between technology and human communication for every customer, every time, everywhere.

James has also served as Senior Director Customer Service Product and Experience, where he was responsible for the 13 teams that look after product development for the post booking customer experience on web and mobile, internal customer service tooling and the customer and partner-facing email and voice experience. Prior to that he held positions as Director of Marketing, which included being responsible for Booking.com’s business in China for 15 months, and Marketing Innovation Manager, where he led IT development across the marketing department while managing the SEO and Demand Innovation teams, helping to accelerate the diversification of the Booking.com marketing department beyond its roots in online search and affiliate marketing. 

James spent his early career in search marketing in the UK, both as an analyst and in operations. He studied at the University of Cambridge and holds both a BA and MA in Biological Anthropology.