OIK Office Staff

Among the OIK team you will find professional backgrounds in the travel trade, youth work, in academic life and in the field of international understanding. We all share the experience of living abroad and travelling the world. Most of us have been with OIK for 10, 20 or even more than 30 years.

In addition to the office staff, OIK works with a large number of free lancers: a network of local organisers, host families, schools, music organizations, tour guides, bus drivers, and suppliers all over Germany. In many other countries in Europe, we have enjoyed a long-standing cooperation with our international associates.

All this ensures know-how and reliability, competence and trustworthiness. We constantly seek to improve, and are always ready to learn from our customers.

Our dedicated, multi-lingual, well-travelled tour guides come from a variety of backgrounds, e.g. sports or music or different lines of professional life, so that we will always find a tour guide who understands and looks after the requirements of your group.

Excellent team communication and a friendly work environment make it easy for each and every one of us to fully commit to our tour groups. Our personalized services have convinced many organizations to travel with us again and again over the years. We are looking forward to showing you how much we enjoy our work!

 

Luise Müller – Founder and Managing Director of OIK
Luise Müller has more than 40 years of experience in both, the incoming and outgoing spheres of tourism, also in youth work and adult education. She was responsible for the exchange programmes with France, Japan, Mexico and Russia during her years at the German Society for International Youth Exchange. For OIK she organised home stays with language schools in more than 100 German towns. She develops new concepts and maintains a wonderful cooperation with her world-wide contacts. In 1979, Luise Müller founded the company SKR – Studien Kontakt Reisen, which has since been sending groups of German tourists to numerous destinations worldwide. 

Joachim Müller – Co-founder and Managing Director
After his studies of history and psychology at Hamburg University, Joachim Müller started working for the German Student Travel Service. In 1975, he co-founded OIK together with his wife, Luise Müller. With his profound knowledge of art and history, especially in the countries of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, he is always ready to advise on study tours and to plan our itineraries. He has also arranged technical visits in many fields for our professional groups. Joachim Müller keeps a tight grip on OIK’s financial and legal matters, and either makes or backs up all major decisions.

Britta von Manteuffel – Head of Tour Department
Britta has been in charge of OIK’s incoming operations since the early days, and is the “Heart and Soul” of our head office. Before she joined OIK, her career had taken her to England for a number of years, where she coordinated music festivals and study programmes. She initiated the OIK international youth music festival which still is one of OIK’s annual highlights. Before her family kept her mainly Europe-bound she had travelled to many places in the world and is especially fond of Australia and New Zealand. Having been on the best of terms with our associates in Europe and overseas for many years, Britta is well-known and well-liked in many corners of the world, and her desk can very well be considered our foreign affairs department.

Anne Baumeister
Ever since Anne came to join OIK back in the nineties she has helped shape OIK’s external communications by representing us at trade conferences, road shows and formal and informal meetings with schools, travel organizations and our overseas associates. Her passion for being on the road, as well as the time she spent working for a tour operator in the United States have made it easy for her to understand the travel needs of overseas visitors in Europe. While Anne enjoys in particular taking the challenge of complex tour projects, with a special focus on music tours, she also devotes her time to designing new itineraries and researching markets. She visits North America frequently and feels at home in both worlds.

Rebecca Owens
Rebecca joined OIK in 2004 with an initial primary focus on coordinating the itineraries of 70 simultaneously travelling youth groups participating in the World Youth Day in the summer of 2005. Managing the various challenges of 3500 youth quickly prepared her for the demanding needs of the travel industry.  She has lived and studied in the US, and completed her internationally focused studies at the University of Bonn.  She has worked for, and with, both commercial industries and non-governmental organizations at international levels.  She not only promotes cultural exchange in her day-to-day work, but on a personal basis continues to explore many corners of the world in an attempt to learn more about foreign cultures and its peoples.  This interest has carried her throughout Europe, the Americas, New Zealand, the South Pacific and many parts of Asia - a multi-cultural landscape of particular interest. 

Olcay Stella Özalp
Olcay has been on the team since 2007. Before she developed a taste for the travel trade, she had studied at the University of Bonn and worked for the visitors offices of German organisations, where she planned and looked after the trips of many governmental guests like journalists, university teachers, researchers, politicians, business people and artists from all over the world who came to Germany on professional and academic exchanges. Furthermore as a tour escort she also took care of international student groups and guests of European organisations. Olcay speaks various languages, among those Turkish and some Swedish.

OIK Asia Department
We are happy to announce that OIK is now in the process of setting up an Asia Department. We have started cooperation with representatives for the Korean, the Japanese, and the Chinese market. 

Dr. Soon-Nyea CHA (Mrs)
Mrs. Cha is the first to join our Asia team. After obtaining her master’s degree in vocal music from the Yon-Sei University in Seoul / Korea, she continued her academic career with a post-graduate programme in Musicology, Chinese, Korean and Japanese at the Folkwang University in Essen / Germany, where she earned her doctorate. Mrs. Cha is founder of the Academy of Music and Language in Bonn, a preparatory school for students from –mainly- Eastern Asia who get ready to attend a conservatory in Germany. The Academy also offers master classes, clinics, workshops and concerts.