Erik has spent thirty years at the intersection of travel, technology, and human experience — and the industry looks the way it does today in no small part because of the decisions he made along the way.
As the second CEO of Expedia, Erik helped transform what began as a Microsoft side project into the online travel platform that changed how the world books travel. He later served as CEO of IAC Travel, overseeing one of the most ambitious integrations in travel history — bringing Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire, and Classic Vacations under one roof at the moment the OTA model was reshaping the entire industry.
But Erik's career has never been about scale alone. As CEO of Butterfield & Robinson — the gold standard in luxury active travel and one of the world's most celebrated multi-day tour operators — he brought the same strategic rigor to the deeply human side of travel: the kind of experience that changes you. He has also served as CEO of TerraPass and Executive Chairman of Couchsurfing and he recently acquired Camp Nominingue, a traditional wilderness adventure summer camp for boys located on Petit Lac Nominingue in Quebec, Canada. Today, Erik spends most of his time focused on Blachford Capital, investing in early-stage companies across travel, health, and clean energy and his current board seats including Zillow Group, Fora Travel, HipCamp, Busbud, Joy Life, DCbel, and the Adventure Travel Trade Association. His most recent investment is in Wheel the World, the platform making travel accessible to everyone.
Erik brings to the Executive Summit something rare: the perspective of someone who has built at scale, led with craft, invested with conviction, and has not lost sight of why travel matters so much in the first place.


