News & Info > Hospitality Pupils’ trip to Switzerland

Hospitality Pupils’ trip to Switzerland

The Middle Sixth Form Hospitality Trip to Switzerland ahead of Half Term was a great success with pupils gaining really valuable insight into the wide range of options available to them on finishing their studies next year.  

The first stop for the group was a visit to the IHTTI School of Hotel Management located in Neuchatel.  This is school that combines luxury business and design with hospitality skills.  In the final year of their degree students can chose to specialise in luxury brand management or project management and design or complete an integrated project.  Then it was off to The Hotel Institute Montreux where students learn traditional Swiss hospitality values combined with American business management skills. The business focus of the hotel and hospitality management courses opens doors to a wide variety of exciting career options for their graduates around the world which was exciting and inspiring for our pupils to learn about.   The group had a classroom session at the Institute before eating at the training restaurant, a well-deserved treat after a long day which had involved an early start.
 
On Tuesday morning the group travelled to the Swiss Hotel Management School.  Here the focus of the course in the first two years is again on hospitality but then the students can choose to focus on international hospitality management or hospitality and events management.  This school is situated high above Montreux in a converted palace hotel. The next stop was the Le Bouveret dual campus for the Culinary Arts Academy and Cesar Ritz Colleges.  Degrees taught here focus on either culinary arts or international business in hotel and tourism management.  To end the visit to the Swiss Education Group of universities, the pupils ate in the fine dining restaurant with students from the colleges to find out first-hand about their experiences.
 
The next morning the group visited Les Roches, the well-known hospitality school which a number of former Milton Abbey pupils now attend.  It was great to catch up with Artemiy who left Milton Abbey last summer and is now studying there and had been on the same trip the previous year.  From the photo, it looks like he is delighted to be there!  
 
The final visit was to the university at Glion, recognised as one of the top three hospitality management schools in the world.  Here our pupils ate in the fine dining restaurant in the evening before returning on Thursday morning in order to talk to the CEO, Guy Bentley, before a tour of the campus.
 
The Milton Abbey pupils returned enthused about the prospect of an international career in hotel and hospitality management and a much clearer idea of how to make that vision a reality.  Head of Hospitality Leonie Monaghan stresses the importance of visiting these schools, “The pupils get to see the location of the different schools, the type of accommodation offered and they get to talk to current students and find out what student life there is really like.  This means that our pupils can get the inside track about their options and make an informed choice.  As part of this process we also investigate UK universities as well as looking at opportunities for going straight into work or apprenticeships.”