Thanks to a relaxation of its own bonus rules, the 60-year-old boss of the Dutch Booking.com can retroactively add an extra 22.6 million euros for the years 2018 and 2019. This is apparent from a statement submitted to the US regulator SEC on Tuesday evening. of Booking Holdings, the American parent company of Booking.com, which accounts for 79 percent of Booking Holdings’ revenue.
A year ago, Fogel was discredited when it turned out that he received a bonus of the converted 6.5 million euros for the corona year 2020, in which Booking.com had to knock on the door of the Dutch taxpayer for state aid with a hat in hand. Despite billions in profits in the years before the pandemic – more than 4 billion euros in 2019 – the travel site had failed to save a buffer for bad times. Instead, in just a few years, the company had bought back $14 billion in its own shares to boost Booking Holdings’ share price, and with it the level of its directors’ stock bonuses.
The rumor about Fogel’s bonus was also due to the fact that Booking.com had just announced that it was planning to lay off more than a quarter of its 17 thousand employees (of which 5500 in the Netherlands). This while Booking, with 65 million euros, was the third largest supporter of the so-called NOW scheme, with which the Dutch government tried to prevent job loss as much as possible. After the fuss about Fogel’s bonus, Booking.com decided to repay the full state aid.
Booking.com justifies Fogel’s fee of nearly 51 million euros by referring to fellow executives of companies that Booking compares itself to, such as Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft, who would earn about the same. In addition, Fogel’s “exemplary leadership” guided the company through the difficult year of 2021, in which turnover in the first quarter was even half lower than during the first three months of 2020, when the number of hotel bookings in January and February was still low. was at a normal level. Nevertheless, Booking.com managed to close the year 2021 with a profit of 1.1 billion euros.
This year, analysts are even counting on a net profit of more than 3 billion euros, which is partly due to new reorganizations among the staff. Earlier this year, it was revealed that Booking is going to transfer thousands of customer service employees to the Luxembourg call center company Majorel, to then hire them again through this third party, but then, employees fear, for worse working conditions.