Tripadvisor CEO Matt Goldberg Exits February 16 as CFO Also Resigns

Tripadvisor said Thursday that CEO Matt Goldberg and the board agreed to his departure, effective February 16. Chief Financial Officer Michael Noonan resigned the same day to pursue another opportunity.

The double exit lands 16 months after activist investor Starboard Value took a 9% stake in the company, and eight months after it won four of 10 board seats. Tripadvisor did not announce a CEO search process.

Who takes over the finance role?

Kristen Dalton, currently chief strategy and operations officer, becomes interim CFO on January 1, 2027. Noonan stays through December 31, 2026 to manage the handover.

That timing gives the company nearly a year of transition planning, but no permanent successor for either the CEO or CFO seat has been named.

What preceded the exits?

The Starboard campaign has reshaped Tripadvisor's leadership and cost structure in short order. The changes to date include:

• Chairman Greg Maffei's exit
• A 20% cut to the workforce
• The $700 million sale of TheFork, Tripadvisor's restaurant booking platform, to American Express

Goldberg's departure adds the top operational job to that list of vacancies and reversals.

What does this change for Viator and hotel metasearch?

The practical question for partners, restaurant operators and experiences suppliers is what the leadership vacuum means for the company's asset structure. Tripadvisor has said no option is off the table for monetizing Viator, its experiences booking business, and its non-core hotel metasearch business.

The board is entertaining strategic alternatives, and the leadership vacancy arrives in the middle of that review. That leaves two questions unresolved at once: who runs the company, and who owns Viator.

A permanent CEO appointment, or a decision on a sale or spin-off of Viator or the metasearch unit, would settle both. Until then, the company is operating with an interim finance chief, no announced chief executive, and an activist-influenced board weighing every option it has publicly declined to rule out.