Avolta is the world’s leading travel experience player. 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.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE The Integral 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.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Economic Strategy & Foundational Thinking

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





Bring rigorous economic reasoning to strategic decisions where intuition and spreadsheets are not enough

Shape the long-term intellectual agenda of the Commercial Optimization function, influencing how the company thinks about demand, value and trade-offs

Design economic frameworks across highly diverse travel locations, passenger flows and product categories

Estimate demand elasticities and cross-price effects, accounting for the unique dynamics of captive travel-retail environments

Develop pricing mechanisms that balance revenue, margin, traveler experience and competitive positioning

Quantify the profit impact of pricing decisions and articulate the trade-oƯs clearly to business leaders

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

Model the economic trade-offs between stock availability, service levels, holding costs and lost sales risk

Inform selection and assortment strategy through demand modeling, substitution effects and longtail economics

Design promotional mechanisms and incentive structures that maximize incremental margin

Establish measurement standards that let the business trust and act on promotional ROI

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

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

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

Deep expertise in econometrics, causal inference and experimentation (e.g., instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, synthetic control, regression discontinuity)

Strong command of demand modeling, elasticity estimation, market structure and incentive/mechanism design

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.

Domain

Knowledge & Business Acumen

Strong understanding of commercial optimization: pricing, demand elasticity, assortment, promotional effectiveness and inventory/working-capital dynamics

Solid financial acumen - P&L; drivers, ROI, working capital and business trade-offs

Ability to connect abstract economic reasoning to concrete commercial value.

Ability to influence without authority and build trust with both technical teams and business leaders

Exceptional ability to explain sophisticated economic ideas simply and persuasively

Clear written and verbal English; additional European languages are advantageous

Comfortable presenting recommendations to senior and executive audiences. Execution & Mindset

Strong bias for action and the ability to move from ambiguity to a rigorous, practical plan

Intellectual curiosity and the ambition to develop what doesn't yet exist

High standards for rigor, always connected to measurable business value

Comfortable in a fast-paced, multi-priority global environment

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