Swiss hotel schools eye another century as ‘world best’

MONTREUX, Switzerland: It feels like a luxury restaurant, with starched-uniformed waiters explaining the intricate details of a gourmet menu as diners gaze out at a spectacular mountain view.
But all the servers, the impeccably dressed guests and even the kitchen staff sending out elaborately decorated plates are in fact students at one of Switzerland´s famous hotel management schools.
“This is part of the student´s learning experience,” said Stephane Bernard, a service instructor at the Glion school, overlooking the picturesque town of Montreux on the shores of Lake Geneva.
The school is ranked among the top three such establishments in the world, all in Switzerland.
For more than a century, the hotel management schools in the wealthy Alpine nation have been considered as the best and draw students from around the world.
Glion alone has some 100 nationalities attending, with French the biggest group followed by Chinese, Russian and Swiss.
But these schools are facing a range of new challenges, with competing, less expensive establishments surfacing in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere, in step with shifting global travel patterns.
The soaring value of the Swiss franc, meanwhile, has made already sky-high tuition at the Swiss schools around 20 percent pricier for students writing their cheques in euros.
The Swiss schools acknowledge that worried parents have enquired about price cuts, but insist that is not the way to go.
“I will never do that, because the increase of the quality is more than the increase of the price,” said Michel Rochat, who heads the Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne (EHL).
Ecole Hoteliere de Lausannecharges around 150,000 Swiss francs (157,000 dollars/146,000 euros) for its three-year bachelor programme for international students.