Sino-Swiss hospitality program welcomes first batch of city students

Ti Gong

The first batch of students attending the College of Shanghai Lausanne Hospitality Management, a collaboration between Shanghai Business School and EHL (Hotel School of Lausanne), Switzerland, had their first lesson on Wednesday at the J Hotel in Shanghai Tower.

A joint China-foreign education program, the new college has been set up to introduce to Shanghai the resources and strengths of the oldest hospitality business and hotel management school in Lausanne.

Its aim is to cultivate high-end talent and improve the city hospitality sector's soft power using an education model that involves deep integration with industry.

Shen Daming, Party secretary of Shanghai Business School, said the college will offer multiple courses delivered in tandem with its Swiss partner and local enterprises in real vocational environments.

On the first school day, Sun Jie, CEO of Trip.com, Peng Lijun, general manager of Shanghai Ruijin Intercontinental Hotel and Chen Liming, executive director of Jin Jiang International (Holdings) Co, lectured students in their first lesson on latest trends in the hospitality industry.

The college also has signed agreements with three local hospitality and tourism giants – Donghu Group, Jin Jiang International (Holdings) Co and Trip.com Group – to provide quality industry resources, including internships and training, for its students.

Donghu will deploy three teachers to the college in the first semester and Jinjiang has vowed to open all its resources to the college, including building an internship base and providing courses on hospitality management. Its senior executives will act as professors on management and its hotel industry masters will be industry lecturers.

Trip.com will cooperate with the college in areas including e-commerce, big data and hotel management, collaborate on industry research and jointly establish a future technology center named after Trip.

In future, the college will hire more teachers with industry backgrounds and undertake teaching and training activities in real career environments to cultivate students' overall practical skills. This will involve not only hotel management, but also health care, data science application, luxury brand management, high-end beauty work, financial services, commercial property management and exhibition planning.

The business school and EHL have developed the teaching plans and a third of courses related to hospitality and e-commerce will be delivered by teachers from the Swiss school.

Wang Junyang, one of the first batch of students, said he stayed in hotels a lot while vacationing with his parents and loved the work environment.

"This program is attractive to me because it's a joint-venture and will enable us to learn high-end hospitality management abroad in the future," he said. "Its courses cover a wide range and I can also learn other skills such as finance and business management."

Zhao Wen, mother of another student, said her son had been keen to study engineering but didn't do well enough in the college entrance exam.

"We had a discussion and concluded that the service sector has a bright future as Shanghai will improve its soft power as an international metropolis," Zhao said.

"And EHL is one of the best hospitality management schools in the world, which is obviously attractive to us. I hope my son will learn practical skills here and become a high-end professional to make a contribution to the development of Shanghai in the future."