Rolf D. Freitag studied Economics at the University of Berlin and Munich and graduated with a Master Degree in Economy from the “Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München”.
In 1969, he founded IPK International, a tourism consultancy specialized in travel research, tourism marketing and tourism masterplanning, which counts among the leading tourism consultancies worldwide. For more than 200 clients from the private and public sector in over 50 countries around the globe, IPK has successfully completed more than 1,000 customized tourism studies, marketing plans and masterplans over the past 45 years. Besides its main focus on tailored studies, on a regular basis IPK International also publishes reports on the latest tourism trends, such as the “World Luxury Travel Report”, the “MICE Travel Report” or a report on its investigation on the impact of terrorism on tourism. Apart from tailored projects, a variety of studies are based on IPK’s World Travel Monitor®, the world’s most comprehensive tourism database on European, Arabian, Asian, North and South American outbound travel behavior covering more than 90% of the international travel demand. The "World Travel Monitor®" with around 500.000 interviews in over 60 countries has established itself as the largest continuous tourism study of its kind.