Tripadvisor and Starboard Value Make Peace: Activist Investor Could Get 4 Board Seats
Photo Credit: In Bangkok, Thailand in December 2023, a woman visits the Tripadvisor website on a laptop. Adobe / Thaspol
Skift Take
Get ready for sales of Viator and/or TheFork — or at least attempts to sell them. Alternately, you also can't rule out a sale or merger of the entire company.
Tripadvisor said Monday evening it reached a deal with Starboard Value that could see the activist investor get four nominees to the Tripadvisor board at the next annual meeting, which usually takes place in June.
The agreement has several elements:
Tripadvisor agreed to immediately increase its board size to 10, up from the current eight directors. Two "new independent appointees," Andrew Cates and Dhiren Fonseca, have joined the Tripadvisor board, and their terms will expire at the annual stockholder meeting. They both have ties to Starboard, however. They can be nominated for the standard one-year term at that shareholder meeting. Starboard can recommend two additional directors for a total of four. One can be a director independent of Starboard, and the other can be a Starboard representative or indepen
