Sustainability in Hospitality | César Ritz Colleges

As a leading global business education institution, César Ritz Colleges Switzerland has the depth of professional expertise required to offer higher education in hospitality leadership at the highest standards of professionalism and ethics. Our faculty and staff are mindful to focus fully on our students and to live up to the promises of our core values in all aspects of our educational approach.

Entrepreneurial

César Ritz Colleges Switzerland opens up an entire new world of hospitality insights, skills, and experiences to you, equally true whether you’ve worked in hospitality previously or not. Our offering is on a global scale you could not have imagined as you worked in your home country.

We cultivate visionaries by opening students to new frontiers of the business of hospitality and tourism. César Ritz Colleges fosters your knowledge and creativity, sharpens your skills and strategic insights, and gives you the boost of confidence you need to become an entrepreneur in whichever business specialty you claim as your own.

Our global economy requires entrepreneurs to constantly invent or update products, create new knowledge, and design better services to stay competitive.

Business Plan Competition
From Creativity to Entrepreneurship

At César Ritz Colleges, our Business Plan Competition gives students an exciting yet collegial competitive challenge to build their entrepreneurial ideas into feasible projects – not working alone but as part of a team, as is most often the case in real business ventures. Your team can take advantage of the advice and expertise of our faculty, who mix research expertise with practical experience, and are the leading minds on entrepreneurship and on preparing leaders for various industries, from hotels and restaurants to retail and the service industry.

How does the competition work in reality? You develop, test, and pitch a start-up idea with your team, while seeking expert advice and mentoring when you think you need it. The competition is all the more interesting and rewarding because César Ritz Colleges’ teams complete in the competition against student teams from our academic partner in the US, Washington State University.

Leadership

Equine Education

The Equine Leadership Workshop, a new leadership training offered to final -term students at CRCS. According to management training expert Sarah Krasker, who leads the workshops not only for CRCS senior students but for executive training programs in multinational corporations and international organisations around the world, the goal of equine-assisted learning is to facilitate emotional intelligence and related skills, competences, and behaviors. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions, while also recognizing and influencing positively the emotions of those you work with.

Leadership Pillar Program

Our Leadership Pillar Program assesses your innate leadership style through personal coaches who talk with you and administer various personality tests. They then meet with you multiple times in one-on-one sessions to help you define your purpose and vision, identifying your personal leadership strengths and areas for development. In the program, you will discover what uniquely sets you apart from your peers. Our experienced coaches have the right mix of hard and soft skills, and are ready to provide reflection, guidance, and feedback, and to motivate you to move to the next step.

This program has unlocked the leadership potential of countless students by providing them with tools, mentorship, and creative options to pursue their careers and become change-makers in the hospitality and tourism community. Not only do faculty and staff engage in the program, but students engage in vital topics with successful business leaders, receiving first-hand insights from a variety of different experts in the hospitality and tourism industry.

In addition, our school partners with Harvard Business Publishing Education, part of one of the top universities in the world, to enrich this offering unique among hospitality and tourism schools and equip our students with essential skills to succeed in the global workforce.

The Leadership Pillar Program focuses on three core learning components: Self-Awareness, Goal Setting, and Leadership Development. The program motivates students to develop their leadership vision through social and personal relationships and contexts as they progress through their studies. While the Self-Awareness component reveals personal traits for leadership development and awareness for balance in life, Goal Setting delves into topics and activities to create personal and professional focus and purpose. The Leadership Development component explores leadership concepts and competencies.

Each program encounter may include a one-hour workshop on a selected topic or a one-on-one discussion between the mentor and student. In terms one and two, students have compulsory introductory sessions where they are challenged to develop self-awareness and goal setting skills. In terms three to eight, the LPP is in partnership with Harvard Business Publishing Education, and participation is voluntary for our students. Each term, students have a leadership topic course to complete with in the program.

The Harvard Business Publishing Education outcomes are:

Learning how to become an effective and inspiring leader by first defining your purpose and values and then creating the conditions for others to succeed.

Learning to navigate change and turn uncertainty into opportunity that benefits you, your team, and your organization.
Discovering how to add value by thinking big, challenging your assumptions, and identifying threats and opportunities.

At the end of the six voluntary courses, students who successfully complete the requirements of the Harvard Leadership Bundle are awarded a Leadership Certificate and social media badge from Harvard Business Publishing Education. Students demonstrating exceptional commitment and outstanding leadership initiatives throughout the program are awarded the Leadership Excellence Award from César Ritz Colleges Switzerland.

Sustainable

César Ritz Colleges is committed to responsible innovation. No longer can our climate afford for us to innovate just for innovation’s sake, regardless of the environmental cost. Innovative concepts must take into consideration the wider environmental impacts of implementation.

Find out more about how César Ritz Colleges Switzerland is making the hospitality industry more sustainable – one project at a time

Sustainable Development Goals: César Ritz Colleges includes UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in its courses and business practices. CRCS believes that the decision-makers in hospitality and tourism should have a broad knowledge and understanding of the UN’s Sustainable Developments Goals, especially environmental sustainability. The school embeds the UN’s SDGs into every class to increase awareness of their relevance and application to professional practices in the tourism and hospitality industry.
Green Globe Club: The Green Globe Club promotes awareness of sustainable practices within César Ritz Colleges, and its aim is to represent the entire CRCS student body in a positive, meaningful, and professional manner. The objectives of the Green Globe Club are to foster a spirit of sustainability among the student body, to coordinate the aims and purposes of the college regarding sustainable development and practices with those of the faculty and management, to promote school pride, to initiate and encourage student sustainability activities, and to ensure an equitable approach to promoting sustainability among all students, staff, and faculty members.

Inclusive

Innovation can go nowhere if it isn’t inclusive! With students on campus representing more than 40 nationalities, our students learn how to work together in multicultural teams – they become leaders who involve everyone and embrace diversity!

CRCS Dress Code: In an effort to assure that all students feel equally considered in César Ritz Colleges’ culture, we created a new dress code that is much more inclusive and gender- neutral than in the past. Download our dress code.

Experiential Learning

Our teaching methods involve concrete experiences where students actively participate in an activity, and these active experiences lead students to test models or theories, apply their theoretical knowledge, and sharpen their skills for the future workplace.

Students participate in an interactive simulation of running a hotel department.
Students work in a laboratory to learn how to develop sustainable housekeeping products.
Industry leaders from a variety of disciplines come to campus as guest speakers, so that students learn not only theory, but hear first-hand what daily business is like in these industries.
Students choose to work on applied projects with real companies.