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German online portal Dreamlines appoints new cto

German online portal Dreamlines appoints new cto
German online cruise portal Dreamlines, founded in January 2012, has appointed Arjan van der Meer as its chief technology officer.

The native Dutchman is now responsible for leading the development team at Dreamlines’ headquarters in Hamburg and aims to generate further growth. The company claims to be the biggest vendor of cruises in the German-speaking market.

van der Meer joins from Agoda, a sister company of booking.com and belonging to Priceline, where he was director of engineering. He has more than 15 years of experience in software engineering and development.

‘With Arjan van der Meer we were able to find an internationally experienced cto, whose expertise lies in the field of highly automatised and fast growing online travel agencies,’ said Felix Schneider, founder of Dreamlines.

van der Meer remarked, ‘I am very happy to support Dreamlines and drive scaling. The cruise industry is an exciting field with great potential as a significant part of sales still happens classically offline.’

The cto added, ‘cruises are a complex product, the sales of which requires a considerable amount of advising. With its experts counseling clients, Dreamlines has found a good solution. Now, I aim to further expand the segment of direct bookings by increased automatisation.’ Customers can book cruises with the company either online or by telephone.

Besides Germany, Dreamlines is active in France, Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Brazil and Australia, with offices in Nice, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Moscow and the Gold Coast. It offers more than 30,000 products ranging from mini-cruises to round-the-world voyages.