News Story
Swiss EuroCHRIE Event
25 Academic Researchers attended the Swiss EuroCHRIE event hosted at the Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne on 27th March. The session started with welcomes from both the Treasurer of EuroCHRIE, Hervé Fournier, and the Swiss Area Consultant and Board member, Hilary Murphy.
The main emphasis for the meeting was on collaboration and sharing research ideas and initiatives. In the first session, there were 4 main papers, the first presented by Gabriel Gazzoli, from "César Ritz Colleges", who discussed a research paper in progress on employee empowerment and customer orientation. Ruth Rios-Morales of LRG- University of Applied Sciences from Bulle next presented her research on “Sovereign Wealth Funds - The New Global Financial Players”, followed by Jon-Hans Coetzer, IHTTI, School of Hotel Management who led a discussion on “Critical thinking and cross-cultural dilemmas in the international classroom of hospitality studies ”. Finally Hilary Murphy presented, on behalf of her HES-SO research partners, the results of Virtual Guide project and the final product, demonstrating the collaborative research efforts of several HES-SO researchers in producing a new mobile based application aimed at supporting the concierge of 3-4 star hotels.
At the next session, John Swarbrooke, recently appointed Director of Research at "Cesar Ritz" Colleges, led the discussion on collaboration, reflecting on schools of thought in academic research and approaches to funding. Further discussion looked at the different research focus of the Swiss hotel school community, areas of future collaboration and proposals regarding promoting research in the Swiss research context. Attendees were further encouraged to join the CHRIE research community and a further meeting aimed at helping new researchers launching their research was proposed by John Swarbrooke, to be hosted by "Cesar Ritz" Colleges later in the year.