EHL Hospitality Business School: the Lausanne hotel school, what it teaches and what a Rosewood general manager says about choosing it

EHL Hospitality Business School is the school most often named when a luxury hotel recruiter is asked where to look. It is also the oldest hotel school in the world, and the one whose structure most of the others have copied: a year of practical immersion first, then business study broken by long internships, then a project with a real client before graduation. This page sets out what the school is, how the bachelor is built, where it stands in the rankings and on what evidence, and what Marc C. Brugger, who ran Rosewood Hong Kong and Rosewood Beijing when I interviewed him, says about choosing it.

What EHL is

The school opened on 15 October 1893 with 27 students in a room of the Hôtel d’Angleterre on the Lausanne lakefront. Its founder, Jacques Tschumi, was managing director of the Beau-Rivage Palace and president of the oversight committee. For most of its life it was the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne; the school moved to its present site at Le Chalet-à-Gobet above the city in 1975, inaugurated a new campus there in 2022, and in the same year took the name EHL Hospitality Business School. The school’s own history page carries the full timeline.

Two other campuses belong to it. EHL acquired the Swiss School of Tourism and Hospitality in Passugg, Graubünden, in 2013, and now runs its Swiss professional diplomas there in English and German. In 2020 it opened a campus in Singapore, its first outside Switzerland, which bachelor students can use for an exchange semester. Internships have been part of the course since 1959, when the school introduced them as a new idea.

Three accreditations sit behind the degree, and the accreditations page lists them. Since 1998 EHL has been associated by convention with HES-SO, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, which is why the bachelor is a Swiss university of applied sciences degree and not a private school certificate. The school holds institutional accreditation from the New England Commission of Higher Education in the United States, reaccredited in April 2024 with the next full review scheduled for fall 2033. And in spring 2024 it was accredited by AACSB, the business school accreditor. It is also a full member of EFMD and of HotellerieSuisse, the Swiss hotel association. The question of what Swiss accreditation means, and how it differs from a degree awarded by a British partner university, is set out on the Swiss hotel schools page.

Programs and how they are taught

The main program is the Bachelor of Science (HES-SO) in Hospitality Management, four years including the Preparatory Year, taught in English or French in Lausanne. The Preparatory Year is taught in English only and is where the school builds customer service through workshops and practical training, alongside what it calls teamwork, communication, time management, agility and self discipline. Students then go out on a six month operational internship before the business years begin.

Year one is the business foundation: management, economics and the skills underneath them. Year two applies them, and its second semester is the second internship, an administrative one, or a start up project in its place. Students can take a semester in Singapore. Year three offers a specialization track, among them Leadership and Management, Advanced Marketing and Luxury Management, Finance and Real Estate, and Entrepreneurial Ventures and Corporate Innovation, and ends in a student business project for a client, done in a team of six, or an independent thesis. The school describes the whole as “two 6-month internships and a business project.”

The practical arts are not simulated. Le Berceau des Sens, the training restaurant on the Lausanne campus, opened to the public in 2011 and was awarded a Michelin star in 2019, according to the school’s history page. Passugg has its own restaurant. The point of a starred room in a school is that the student cooks and serves for guests who paid and who did not come to be kind.

Beyond the bachelor, EHL offers an MSc in Global Hospitality Business taught with partner institutions, a Master in Wine and Hospitality, an Executive MBA, a doctorate in business administration and a culinary associate degree. At Passugg it runs the Swiss Professional Degree in Hospitality Management (HF), in English and German, with specializations in culinary arts, spa and wellness, and sustainable management; graduates of that diploma can finish the EHL bachelor in three further semesters, two in Passugg and the last in Lausanne. Passugg also runs a three year hotel communications apprenticeship, in German only, which the school says is certified by the Swiss federation.

Who it is for and how to get in

EHL suits the student who wants a business degree with hospitality at its center and is willing to spend a first year in service before touching a spreadsheet. The French track suits a student who wants to work in Switzerland, France or francophone Africa; the English track and the Singapore semester suit the student aiming at Asia or the Gulf, where many of the general managers in my books now work.

The school states its requirements plainly. An applicant must be at least 18 before the program starts and hold a completed secondary qualification that grants university access in their home country. The school looks for strong academic results, especially in analytical subjects such as mathematics, and for language skills suited to the chosen track. Fees, scholarships and intake dates change each year and are on the school’s site; this page does not repeat them.

Alumni and outcomes

EHL’s standing rests on reputation surveys more than on published outcome data. The school’s rankings page records first place in the QS World University Rankings by Subject for Hospitality and Leisure Management in every edition from 2019 to 2026, eight consecutive years. QS builds that subject table from academic reputation, employer reputation and research citations per paper. The 2026 table as a whole, which I read through a third party reproduction rather than on the QS site, puts EHL first ahead of Les Roches and Glion. Rankings of this kind measure what recruiters and academics say about a school; they do not measure what happens in a classroom.

The school’s bachelor page names a handful of graduate ventures rather than hotel groups, so I will not claim an employer list the school does not publish. What can be said is that the employer reputation score EHL earns comes from the people who hire, and that the two six month internships put every graduate inside two real operations before anyone reads their CV.

What the hoteliers in my books say

One of the thirty six general managers in A Wealth of Insight is an EHL graduate: Marc C. Brugger, then general manager of Rosewood Hong Kong and Rosewood Beijing. He grew up in Lausanne, in a family whose graphic arts firm had printed advertising for Swiss palace hotels since 1882, and his first job was on a hotel terrace in the same city.

“My first job in the hospitality industry was as a waiter on the terrace of the Royal Savoy Hotel & Spa in Lausanne, Switzerland.” Marc C. Brugger, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)

He was still undecided between a Paris business school and the hotel school at home when he visited both.

“I visited both schools, and when I saw the atmosphere at EHL, suddenly all of my early memories and emotions came back to me from traveling to glamorous hotels when I was young. I wanted to join an industry where I could create those memories for others.” Marc C. Brugger, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)

What the school did not do was make him a manager. That happened in a hotel restaurant in Cancún, at the end of a corporate training program, when the restaurant’s manager was let go and the long serving waiters asked for the trainee.

“Having earned the trust and respect of the team in just a few short weeks during my corporate training, it was the wait staff who suggested to the general manager that I be hired for the role.” Marc C. Brugger, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)

None of the other hoteliers in my books names EHL. Several studied hotel management somewhere without saying where, and their accounts carry the same lesson Brugger’s does. George Cozonis, who went on to run The Plaza in New York, is the frankest.

“After studying hotel management, I truly believed I would be hired as a general manager upon graduating. It was a wakeup call when, in my first job as a management trainee, I could barely keep up answering telephones at the reception desk.” George Cozonis, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)

How to decide

Visit, as Brugger did, because the atmosphere of the place decided it for him and a brochure cannot. Ask the school how many weeks a student spends serving paying guests before graduation, and where last year’s class went. Weigh the French track against the English one by where you want to work at 25. Then read the second chapter of The Luxury of Attention, The Apprenticeship, which argues that the schools open a door and the trade is learned behind it.

“No one in this book taught themselves. Every master in these pages is the product of another master.” The Luxury of Attention (2026), Chapter 2

The companion pages on Glion, Les Roches and the other Swiss schools set out the alternatives in the same country.

Sources

• EHL, Our history
• EHL, Accreditations and memberships
• EHL, Bachelor degree in hospitality
• EHL, Swiss Professional Diplomas (Passugg)
• EHL Group, Rankings
• Reproduction of the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2026, Hospitality and Leisure Management