MAIRDUMONT/Kompass and freytag & berndt join forces to build the world’s largest cartography publisher
MAIRDUMONT GmbH & Co. KG, Europe’s leading provider of travel media, has taken over the cartography division of the long-established Viennese company freytag & berndt through its subsidiary Kompass Karten GmbH. With this step, the world’s largest cartography publisher with analogue and digital products is created under the name Kompass Freytag & Berndt.
The approximately 30 employees of Freytag-Berndt und Artaria KG in Vienna, who work for digital and analogue products at Kartografie-Verlag and generated a turnover of just over four million euros in the last financial year, are moving to Kompass Freytag & Berndt GmbH. Together with the existing Kompass team in Innsbruck, which also comprises around 30 people, a powerful unit is being created. Both locations – Vienna and Innsbruck – will be retained.
The portfolio of freytag & berndt includes a wide selection of city maps, street and hiking maps, atlases and a continuously updated database of hiking trails and hiking tours that covers large parts of the world. This portfolio complements MAIRDUMONT’s existing cartography brand universe, which in addition to Kompass also includes Marco Polo, ADAC Kartografie, Hallwag and Kümmerly+Frey and, since September 2025, BVA BikeMedia.
Both companies stand for cartographic precision and innovation. What once began with hand-drawn maps is now being further developed with satellite images and open geodata in state-of-the-art systems. Digital cartography is becoming more and more important. Kompass and freytag & berndt are already using their data for outdoor apps and licensing geodata to navigation and map providers, especially in the field of outdoor.
“We are very pleased to welcome freytag & berndt to the MAIRDUMONT family with its dedicated team and its excellent cartography expertise,” say Markus Schneider, Managing Director of MAIRDUMONT and Kompass Karten GmbH, and Stephanie Mair-Huydts, publisher of MAIRDUMONT.
Carl Rauch, former Managing Director of Freytag-Berndt und Artaria KG and in the future Managing Director of the new Kompass Freytag & Berndt GmbH alongside Markus Schneider, is also positive about the future: “In a challenging market, you have to pool resources. Kompass and freytag & berndt will thus be able to further expand their program and expand the topics of hiking, cycling, street cartography and city maps internationally and increasingly also digitally, so that our customers can easily reach their destination anywhere in the world.”
The sales structure will be restructured from January 2026. The other business areas of freytag & berndt – including the travel bookstore in Vienna, the publishing house delivery in Wolkersdorf and the subsidiaries Bergverlag Rother and FB Imray – will remain with the previous shareholders.