Highest-Paid Online Travel CEOs of 2018
Photo Credit: Booking Hotels CEO Glenn Fogel was the highest paid online travel CEO in 2018. Booking / Natasha Miller
Skift Take
The CEOs of Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, and TripAdvisor all saw their total compensation fall in 2018, but only because 2017 was an exceptional year for each. Glenn Fogel of Booking and Mark Okerstrom of Expedia were each appointed as CEO in 2017, and Steve Kaufer of TripAdvisor received a long-term incentive award that was undoubtedly the envy of his peers.
The CEOs of Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, and TripAdvisor all took pay cuts in 2018. But shed no tears: Their compensation dives last year were mostly because each had a spectacular 2017.
Still, Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings, was the most highly compensated public company online travel leader in 2018 with total compensation of $20.45 million.
In this era of massive CEO compensation packages — in the United States, at least — it may be crass to characterize it as such, but Fogel's payday was relatively modest compared with the 2017 pay mark of TripAdvisor co-founder and CEO Steve Kaufer, whose total compensation that year was nearly $47.9 million.
Kaufer's 2017 payola, though, was sort of a lifetime achievement award in that he received stock awards that year of nearly $28.6 million and option awards of $18.2 million. Kaufer, who isn't eligible for another long-term incentive equity grant until 2022, received total compensation in 2018 of just $1.97 million, t
