With more than a decade of hands-on experience in the travel industry, ViaTour Co-President Karen Ziegler genuinely understands the challenges faced by busy tour operators, planners and service providors. Karen’s first foray into the educational travel world was planning a 6-week study and travel program for students at USC. For 2 years, she orchestrated the logistics, financials and execution of the media and communications-themed program that took students to London, Paris, Prague and Geneva.

From there, Karen moved on to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art where, under her guidance, the travel program saw a 200% increase in participation, tour offerings and revenue. It was also at SBMA that the idea for ViaTour software took root, as Karen continuously searched for tools that would help streamline the process of processing reservations, invoicing travelers and working with tour partners.

Karen ultimately left SBMA to focus on the fledgling ViaTour while continuing to gain first-hand experience by opening her own tour company, Galleries & Gardens. She planned custom itineraries for universities, museums and garden groups before retiring the company in 2006 to devote her energies full-time to ViaTour.

Today, Karen heads up client services and oversees the implementation of ViaTour as well as serves as liaison between clients and technical for developing new functionality and features. Karen loves working with travel professionals and is passionate about developing systems that free up valuable time spent on onerous tasks that detract from staff productivity, creativity and success. She loves taking ViaTour’s inherent flexibility and custom fitting it to a client’s specific needs, as well as working in concert with clients to build new features and reports. After 13 years, she finds that each new implementation is as much a learning opportunity for her as it is for the client and that those experiences result in new and exciting opportunities for everyone.

Co-President Ann Ziegler is the power behind ViaTour's technical engine. Together with other VT senior management, she helps devise and is responsible for implementing the strategies that make ViaTour a leader in its class.

Ann's career developing custom database applications began more than 25 years ago. She has kept pace with the evolution of the industry, from the days of dBase, Clipper, and Paradox, through to all versions of Microsoft Access. Her current work focuses extensively on current releases of Access, .NET and SQL Server. With a client base that includes Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations, Ann's applications are deployed worldwide in both public and private sectors and an array of industries, including industrial safety and environmental compliance, facilities management and assessment, health care quality management and analysis, and our particular favorite -- travel!

In keeping with ViaTour's core values of delivering quality, industry-standard software, Ann ensures our reliable and robust suite of applications are in line with professional best practices, including standard naming conventions, coding practices, error handling and in-line documentation. Her passion for data-driven functionality has made ViaTour one of the most flexible and scalable business solutions available today, capable of meeting the needs of both large and small business models, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, and in every niche of the educational and affinity travel market.

Backed by more than 33 years in the technology industry, Larry Ridenour brings with him a broad skill set informed by his work programming main-frame computers as an MS Consultant and managing the entire IT Department at American Eagle.

Today, Larry leads ViaTour Software Web Solutions and the development of custom add on applications using Microsoft tools such as .Net Framework, ASP.Net, MVC3, C#, SQL Server, JavaScript etc.

His high quality Object Oriented designs put a keen focus on rapid development and offer our customers cost-effective solutions without sacrificing the technological edge that helps keep them ahead of the curve.