Highest-Paid Online Travel CEOs of 2018

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, the lowest of the four executives we considered. (See table below.) CEO Pay Fell for 3 Bosses With the exception of then-Booking.com CEO Gillian Tans, whose compensation package rose 6 percent to $14.47 million in 2018, edging out Expedia Holdings CEO Mark Okerstrom for second highest among the four executives, all of the executives' pay packages fell in 2018 versus 2017. That's because Booking's Fogel, Expedia's Okerstrom, and TripAdvisor's Kaufer each had a milestone year of sorts in 2017, and 2018 looked a tad shabby in comparison. Shabby, though, is in the eyes of the beholder. Fogel's $20.45 million compensation in 2018 was 402 times higher than the average employee pay at the company, Okerstrom's $13.08 million bested the average Expedia worker 194 to 1, and Kaufer's relatively modest $1.97 million bun