Besides of course reporting on the achievements of the previous year and outlining an overview of the current business year, the General Meeting of the OTDS Association on June 21 also included the regular election of the new seven-member Board of Directors. After the members had certified the good work of the incumbent board for the year 2022 and discharged the directors, the election of the new board took place. All previous board members ran again and were elected to office by the members.
The subsequent constituent board meeting appointed Ömer Karaca, Managing Director of Schmetterling International GmbH & Co. KG as chairman. Schmetterling joined the association in its founding year 2011 and has been working successfully with OTDS for many years. The outgoing chairman Lothar Schmitz of Amadeus Leisure IT congratulated Karaca and is looking forward to further productive cooperation in the board. Deniz Ugur (Bentour) and Michael Becher (Bewotec) were appointed as deputies. The further executive committee positions are held by Lother Schmitz, Thorsten Hendricks (Schauinsland), Haiko Gerdes (TraSo) and Michael Fischerkeller (vtours).
Ömer Karaca starts his three-year term as chairman with the objective of making the cooperation between the tourism players international, competitive and future-oriented. The OTDS data format has firmly established itself as a market standard. The top 5 tour operators for quite a while rely on the open, standardized format and have – according to Karaca – “recognized the benefits of a diverse pool of offers for customers and the associated technological leap.” Among other things, Karaca now his new role wants to focus on “attracting more and especially smaller companies from the international range of tour operators and tourism service providers to OTDS.”