Inside the elite Swiss school for hotel managers
As befits a country that runs like clockwork, a university-level institution is coaching students in the exacting standards of high-end hospitality.
In a smart restaurant on the edge of Lausanne, a young woman from Cannes is attempting to open a bottle of Laurent-Perrier Cuvée Rosé. Watching from the middle of the dining room, which has views of the Alps across Lake Geneva, is Eric Iunker, a lecturer whose eyebrows seem to be permanently raised.
At the critical moment, a rush of air escapes from the bottle, not with a pop so much as an urgent “shhhh”, like the airlock on some sci-fi spaceship. “I’m sorry, it’s not supposed to make a noise,” says 19-year-old Chiara Dosne. She blushes a little before pouring my glass.
The student, who wears a red necktie over a shirt that is as carefully ironed as the linen tablecloths, has poured champagne before; she used to work in a bar. “But here the standard is much higher,” she says, gently lowering the bottle back into its ice bucket.
I’m having lunch at Berceau de Sens, which is surely the only Michelin-starred restaurant that guests must reach by traipsing through a student cafeteria. The restaurant is the culinary heart of EHL Hospitality Business School, an elite Swiss university better known by its former title, the École Hôtelière de Lausanne. Its alumni include the general managers of some of the world’s grandest hotels.
Dosne and the other students, who are being put through their paces on both sides of the kitchen pass, are just two weeks into their four-year degrees in international hospitality management. Given that the course fees amount to SFr177,050 (just over $200,000, and not including accommodation), most of them have enjoyed privileged upbringings. But in their first year here, they must do practical work, from pouring wine to poaching eggs — and polishing lavatories to a five-star shine.
“They are not being trained to become room attendants, but they have to understand the importance and principle of cleaning to the highest standards,” says Julien Simon, who ran the rooms division of a big hotel before joining EHL in 2013. “And you have to imagine that some of them have never even touched a Hoover.”
I find Simon armed with a clipboard in a corridor at the on-campus accommodation. A group of freshmen dressed in smart white polo shirts are racing to tidy and clean their classmates’ rooms. “The hardest things are the polishing and the hair in the drains,” says Justine Lutt, 18, from Paris, who met her first mop last week.
As we talk, Simon finds a barely visible fingerprint on a white wardrobe. But he says the space under a bed is the true measure of any hotel’s standards. He recalls staying at a hotel run by a friend who knew of his eagle eye, and thinking “gotcha!” when he found a small piece of paper under his bed. “I pulled it out and, written on it was: ‘Yes, we have cleaned under the bed’.”
