Vacasa

Samantha Cisneros

Channel Partnership Strategist

Samantha Cisneros’s channel-marketing work is shaped by understanding property owners’ concerns and coordinating complex operational change. During a transition to independent franchises, she helped oversee the migration of approximately 40,000 units across 60 companies in one year. The work involved building workflows, setting timelines, coordinating teams and aligning external partners. Her experience reflects a central principle: effective partnerships depend on understanding each side’s needs and creating processes that can work beyond a single challenge.

From Hospitality to Channel Marketing

Cisneros began in restaurant management, becoming a general manager in her early twenties at The Tavern in Austin, Texas, a restaurant operating for more than 100 years. Leading a highvolume team whose members ranged from 18 to 60 taught her to listen and support people with different needs.

She later began in owner support at Vacasa/Casago, listening to owners’ concerns about how their homes would be marketed and presented online. That experience informed decisions affecting owners, online travel agencies and technology providers. As her responsibilities expanded to platforms including Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com, she learned to anticipate feedback and explain business decisions. During the franchise transition, this background helped her navigate conversations with new franchise owners unfamiliar with channel setup.

Building Partnerships That Deliver Results

For Cisneros, successful partnerships begin with recognizing that companies have different goals. She works to understand what a partner needs, explain how a decision may affect them, and provide information they can take to their leadership. When a preferred plan is not feasible, she brings that feedback back to her team, weighs risks and alternatives, and works toward a shared resolution. “You have to put yourself in different people’s shoes,” she says, “so that you can navigate uncharted territory.” Trust and open communication help turn a request into collaboration.

The portfolio migration was primarily an exercise in execution and process-building, rather than conventional business growth.

Cisneros helped coordinate around five to ten migrations per month and develop timelines, templates and workflows intended to make transitions easier and useful to other franchisees facing similar changes. She coordinated with product, accounting, finance, guest experience and external platforms to build a repeatable approach.

She also led “No Home Left Behind,” an initiative to improve underperforming listings instead of relying only on adding inventory. Working with Vrbo, the team refreshed photographs, rewrote descriptions and updated amenity information for approximately 250 units, generating around 1,200 additional reservations in six weeks. Earlier, she partnered with a thirdparty merchant to introduce buy-now-pay-later options across the portfolio. She reported an approximately 140% year-over-year increase in loan volume.

A People-Centred Approach to Leadership

Cisneros’s leadership philosophy centres on listening, practical support and helping employees develop confidence and skills. She speaks Spanish and works with multicultural teams, including colleagues in Chile. She also measures her effectiveness partly by retention: several people reporting to her have remained for seven to nine years. She sees their growth and ability to take on unfamiliar work as an important measure of success.

Cisneros sees opportunities in AI and property-management platforms such as Guesty and Streamline, particularly when industry feedback leads to better tools and processes. With teams expected to do more with fewer resources, she believes prioritization and efficiency will become increasingly important. Smaller franchise operators can also use local knowledge to communicate what makes their offerings distinctive while keeping value attainable.

Her advice to young professionals is to build relationships with care, not simply to network. Hospitality is a relatively small industry, she notes, and colleagues may meet again years later in different roles or organisations. “It’s not just networking, but really connecting with folks,” she says. Trust matters, but maintaining it through consistent actions matters just as much.