Good morning, Broadsheet readers! A Rockefeller heir is going after the oil company that made her family a fortune, the gender pay gap is growing among high-paying jobs in the U.K., and Expedia's new CEO got the top job by taking the one no one wanted. Have a wonderful Wednesday.
- Jet set. A decade ago, Ariane Gorin accepted the job no one else wanted. She was a year into working at Expedia, the travel giant. And she agreed to move from Paris to London to lead Expedia's affiliate network, a nexus of travel partners like the hotels that list bookings on Expedia's sites. "Nobody else in the company really wanted that job. It wasn't seen as a great place to be, because everyone wanted to be in the consumer business," she remembers.
But Gorin turned the role into a surprise cash cow. She asked questions like, "Where is the market opportunity? Where should we go? How do we understand customer needs, and then build solutions for them?" she remembers. What is now called Expedia's B2B private label business today makes up about one-quarter of the company's $11.6 billion in annual revenue.
The leap of faith helped Gorin earn another title: CEO of Expedia, a role she officially began this month. She was promoted to the top job after a decade at the company, most recently as president of Expedia for Business.
B2B travel is no longer seen as an undesirable slice of the industry to be in. But now that Gorin is in a new role, she's circling back to where everyone wanted to be a decade ago, and doubling down on Expedia's consumer business, the travel-booking products from Expedia to VRBO that the company is best known for.
She says that earning a CEO job as an internal candidate gives her an advantage to execute on her goals, which in addition to growing the consumer business include incorporating AI into the travel booking experience, and diving into Expedia's marketing—including a partnership with Netflix capitalizing on the growing popularity of TV show-inspired vacations. Her other priority? Getting used to shopping in American grocery stores again after moving to Seattle following more than 20 years in Europe.
The job makes Gorin one of the 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs who are women. "I'm conscious that there aren't as many female CEOs running Fortune 500 companies," she says, "which means that people are looking to us even more to be role models."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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