With a traveler-centric philosophy and a geographically diverse network, the travel retail and F&B; company addresses the needs of up to 2.3 billion passengers each year, with 5,500 outlets in more than 75 countries across six continents. Guided by their Destination 2027 strategy and boosted by their recent combination with travel F&B; giant Autogrill, the company is well positioned to realize their ambition to create a Travel Experience Revolution through their many locations at airports, motorways, cruise lines, seaports and railway stations amongst others. The General Economist, Commercial Optimization & Data will be a key hire for the future of Avolta’s Commercial Optimization function. The role centers on economic reasoning: modeling how travelers, prices, assortment and promotions interact and designing frameworks that guide Avolta’s commercial decisions. Working closely with data scientists, BI engineers and product teams, this role will own the economic foundations of our commercial models, including causal identification, elasticity estimation, incentive design, market structure and the trade-offs that drive profitable growth. Given Avolta’s scale pricing, availability, selection and promotions across thousands of outlets and billions of passenger interactions this is a foundational role with significant impact. The Global Economist will develop new approaches to dynamic pricing, optimize working capital through smarter inventory and availability decisions, and rigorously measure the incremental value of promotions and assortment. Modeled on senior economist roles in leading technology and commerce companies, this position requires deep econometric expertise, strong business intuition and the ability to transform ambiguous,



high-stakes commercial questions into rigorous, actionable economic insight.
Build the economic foundations for Avolta's commercial optimization across pricing, availability, selection and promotions
Frame ambiguous commercial questions as testable economic hypotheses, and define the models, experiments and metrics needed to answer them
Shape the long-term intellectual agenda of the Commercial Optimization function, influencing how the company thinks about demand, value and trade-offs
Develop economic models that connect availability and assortment of decisions to working-capital efficiency, identifying how smarter inventory and selection choices free up capital without sacrificing revenue
Inform selection and assortment strategy through demand modeling, substitution effects and longtail economics
Design and analyze experiments (A/B tests, geo-experiments, natural experiments) to establish causality behind commercial levers
Apply modern causal-inference and econometric methods to observational and experimental data
Set the standard for how the organization measures cause and effect in commercial decisions
Partner with data scientists and engineers to translate economic frameworks into production models and tools, providing the economic logic and rigor behind them
Work closely with commercial, finance,



category, supply chain and analytics teams to embed economic thinking into everyday decisions
Communicate complex economic insights clearly to non-technical business leaders, up to Director and Senior Director level, with selective executive exposure
Act as a trusted advisor on the economic implications of major commercial decisions
Advanced degree in Economics (PhD strongly preferred) or a closely related quantitative field with a strong econometric foundation
~6–8+ years applying economics to real business problems, ideally in retail, e-commerce, travel, hospitality, marketplaces or a technology company
~ Track record of turning economic analysis into decisions that generated measurable impact - revenue growth, margin improvement, working-capital efficiency or better pricing
~ Experience originating novel frameworks or mechanisms, not only running standard analyses
~ instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, synthetic control, regression discontinuity)
~ Hands-on ability to work with data using SQL, R, Python or Stata to build and validate models independently
~ Comfortable partnering with data scientists and engineers on model design while owning the economic rigor. Strong understanding of commercial optimization: pricing, demand elasticity, assortment, promotional effectiveness and inventory/working-capital dynamics
~ Ability to connect abstract economic reasoning to concrete commercial value.
~ Clear written and verbal English; Comfortable presenting recommendations to senior and executive audiences. Comfortable in a fast-paced, multi-priority global environment

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📌 Global Economist, Commercial Optimization & Data (Madrid)
🏢 Avolta
📍 Madrid