What 200 Restaurants Taught Him About Running Hotels: Christian Hürlimann on HotellerieSuisse

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Christian Hürlimann, Director of HotellerieSuisse, the Swiss hotel association. Hürlimann spent two decades away from hotels, running large-scale catering at Eldora, where at one point he oversaw around two hundred restaurants and well over a thousand staff. He came back to hospitality in 2025 to lead the association, and he brought a caterer's eye for what hotels could do differently. The full conversation is available to watch below.

What twenty years away changed

The first thing Hürlimann noticed on returning was that the hierarchy had softened. Twenty years ago, he said, hotel management was strictly top-down, decisions made at the top and middle managers left as operational order-takers. That was part of why he left. Coming back, he found far more empowerment, even if the students he speaks to still feel some of the old top-down pull.

The second change was about warmth. Fifteen years ago, Switzerland carried a reputation for not being quite friendly enough, often measured against Austria. That has gone, he said. The people in Swiss hotels now are warm and welcoming, and Simone, who has visited Switzerland often, agreed.

His first move as director was to travel the country and listen to operators, and what struck him was the people. He found passion, flexibility and hard work everywhere. Hospitality cannot stockpile its product, since you cannot make a room-night or a meal in advance, so the work demands constant flexibility. He also saw a real entrepreneurial streak even inside five-star hotels, with leaders who push genuine empowerment down to their teams.

Excellence in every class

HotellerieSuisse represents the whole range, from the smallest family-run hotel to the grandest palace, and Hürlimann is clear about the goal that should hold across all of it. Excellence is not the property of five-star hotels alone. A three-star can deliver outstanding service and quality, and every hotel should aim to be the best in its own classification. Switzerland's standards are high and so are its prices, so the real test is simple. A guest should go home certain it was worth it.

What hotels can learn from catering

This is where his catering years come in. When you are responsible for two hundred restaurants and over a thousand people, he said, micromanagement is simply not an option. You have to give your people confidence, and middle management most of all, because they take pressure from above and below at once. Empower them to make their own decisions and trust those decisions will be sound. The payoff is real. People stay, because they can take on more responsibility and move up, and in twenty years, he said, nobody ever made a call bad enough to put the company at risk. His message to hotel managers is to hand middle management that confidence, partly because it is the right thing and partly because it makes the top job far less stressful.

The same logic applies to cost. Hürlimann thinks hotels are often afraid to trim a resource or a service, worried it will cost them quality. His view is that you optimise where there is no threat to quality, and that every hotel has such places, jobs that could be done better or faster, often with help from AI, without a guest ever feeling the difference.

He also pushed empowerment into the guest moment. Simone offered an example. He phones a hotel he likes to match a price he has seen on Booking.com, and is told the receptionist cannot decide and he should call back tomorrow, so he books on Booking.com instead. Hürlimann noted that Booking.com is a special case, since rate-parity contracts stop a hotel from undercutting it directly, but the principle holds. When a guest has had a poor meal, the answer is not a token free coffee. It is to be properly generous, to comp the whole family's dinner and say plainly that the evening fell short of how the hotel likes to work. That kind of generosity is a matter of culture, and culture has to be shown, built and given time. He reached for Michael Jordan to sum it up, recalling the line that talent wins games but teamwork wins championships.

Use the tool, keep the experience

The interview closed on the HumanX theme, technology and humanity together rather than one against the other. For Hürlimann, AI is a tool. Like a knife or a hammer, it has to be learned, and it stays a tool. Four and five-star hotels sell experiences, and an experience still needs a human being to deliver it. He is confident AI will not replace a human-made experience within the next five or ten years.

So the job is to point the tool at the right things. Use it to work more efficiently behind the scenes, and to take the friction out of the dull moments for the guest, the form you fill in at check-in and the like, so that people are freed to create something memorable. There is plenty of room to improve. He still arrives at hotels he has visited four or five times and gets asked whether it is his first stay, which tells him the industry is not yet using the information it already holds. That, he suggested, is exactly the kind of thing a summit like HumanX should help the industry work out.