Whether you're heading off for a luxury break in the Caribbean or going camping in Yosemite, just think what you could afford this holiday season if you featured in this chart of executive pay at some of the world's biggest service providers.

Figure 1: Sources: Bloomberg, companies, IRS, Reuters, SEC

Staggering as it might seem, new-ish Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S) CEO Marcelo Claure received more in total compensation last financial year than any other executive on our list, receiving a package worth nearly $22 million despite not joining Sprint until mid-August (the operator's financial year runs to the end of March).

Has Claure justified his inflated paycheck? We'll not offer judgment on that in this story but it's worth noting that Sprint's share price has fallen by 57% since this time last year, just days before Claure took over.

In Europe, Cesar Alierta, CEO of Spanish incumbent Telefónica , can crack open the cava in celebration, having collected a cool $8.6 million in total compensation, more than any of his regional peers. Indeed, Alierta received about ten times as much as Dominique Leroy, the CEO of Belgium's Proximus and one of only two female CEOs on our list, the other being Chua Sock Koong of Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. (SingTel) (OTC: SGTJY).

Alierta's been head honcho at Telefónica since the Jurassic age of telecom, having taken up his current role in mid-2000, when satellites were all the rage and mobile data meant faxing spreadsheets to your boss. He must be doing something right, but Telefónica's share price has also suffered in the past year, falling by 8.4% over that period on the New York Stock Exchange.

In Asia, meanwhile, Chua Sock Koong was far better compensated than Leroy, receiving a package worth about $3.6 million for her efforts at the Singaporean incumbent, which owns stakes in a number of other service providers across the region.

But the highest earner at the operators we were able to analyze in this region (many companies do not disclose this information) was Simon Moutter, CEO of New Zealand's Spark, whose total compensation last year was about $4.3 million -- more than was paid to Vodafone Group plc (NYSE: VOD) boss Vittorio Colao or Telecom Italia (TIM) head Marco Patuano.

That's not bad considering Spark operates in a market of fewer than 5 million people and has no major overseas subsidiaries.

We've included a few more details about the executives and operators we researched in the tables below. For simplicity's sake, we've used yearly average currency exchange rates from 2014 (based on IRS data), even though some operators' financial years do not mirror the calendar year. We've also relied heavily on annual reports and SEC filings but used Bloomberg and Reuters as data sources in some instances.

– The Staff, Light Reading