Czech Airlines (SA) has appointed a new member to its supervisory board: Jiří Jurán. Meanwhile, Vladimír Perný has taken over the position of cargo manager at SA.

Jurán, who has spent most of his career in banking, studied economics at the Mining University in Ostrava and also holds an MBA from Sheffield Hallam University. Apart from sitting on the SA supervisory board, he is also a board member at the Czech Consolidation Agency.

Perný came to SA from freight forwarder echofracht, where he held various managerial positions over the past 13 years, most recently serving as business director for foreign strategy development.

Perný has a master's degree from the University of Economics in Prague and an MBA from a joint program of the Czech Management Center in elákovice and Chicago-based De Paul University.

In another personnel change in the airline industry, budget airline easyJet named John Kohlsaat the regional general manager for Germany, Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and Denmark.

Kohlsaat, a German native, has spent most of his career in the tobacco industry. A graduate of the Institute for Industrial Market and Advertising Research in Hamburg, Kohlsaat joined German cigarette producer Rothmans Cigaretten in 1996. He worked in the tobacco industry for the next nine years, developing strategies for launching new brands, among other things. Following the merger of British American Tobacco (BAT) and Rothmans Cigaretten in 2001, he became senior international brand manager for the Kent brand at the BAT head office in London.

In 2005 Kohlsaat started working in the airline industry as general manager for easyJet Germany.

IT distribution company BGS Distribution Czech has put its new distribution manager, Stanislav Barvíř, in charge of dealing with client Hewlett-Packard.

Barvíř was previously a partner account manager for Hewlett-Packard's Czech distribution channel.

Markéta Šebková has been named marketing and public relations manager at the Hilton Prague. She has worked at the Hilton since graduating from the Faculty of Arts at the Palacký University in Olomouc in 1998. She started at the hotel as an assistant to the general manager. Šebková was a marketing executive before receiving the promotion.

Telecommunications operator Alcatel Czech recently announced the appointment of Ivo Přikryl as business director for the telecom segment. Přikryl has spent his whole career in the telecom industry. Before joining Alcatel, he worked in the telecom department of Microsoft Czech Republic and Slovakia.