Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
Where are you spending your holidays this year: at home or abroad (or both)? A tourism historian explains why almost half of Swiss say they’re planning on taking a staycation this year. Here are other news and stories from Switzerland on Thursday.
In the news: Storm damage, a cyberattack on parliament, and a possible reprieve for residents of a village lying below a crumbling mountain.
- Storms caused around CHF45million ($49.4 million) of damage in Switzerland last year. That is around a tenth of the damage seen the previous year, according to the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL). There were no fatalities. Most of the damage was caused by flooding during the summer.
- The website of the Swiss parliamentExternal link has been the target of a malicious attack since yesterday. At the end of the day, parliament’s services said the attack had been neutralised and that no internal systems or data had been affected, but there were still problems accessing the website this morning.
- Will it? Won’t it? Last night the authorities in eastern Switzerland said the likelihood of a major collapse of the crumbling mountain above Brienz/Brinzauls had decreased but could still not be ruled out. The village’s 84 residents were evacuated on May 12 after geologists warned that a mass of two million cubic metres of rock looming over the village could break loose.
Is there is a risk that travel will become a luxury for the privileged? Tourism historian Laurent Tissot thinks there is.
In an interviewExternal link with Le Temps newspaper, Tissot offers describes the fundamental trends that are shaking up the sector.
Three years after holidays abroad were put on ice by Covid, and despite the re-opening of almost all travel possibilities, the recent TCS Travel BarometerExternal link found that almost half of those questioned had no great desire to leave the country, while a survey by Switzerland TourismExternal link found that 43% of Swiss plan to spend their holidays at home, compared with 30% abroad. What’s going on?
“I don’t think we can ignore what’s happening in Ukraine – this considerable and tragic war – or the economic issues, both of which can influence people’s choice of destination,” Tissot said. “Having said that, perhaps what happened during the ‘Covid holidays’ has become a habit. Of course, Switzerland is expensive, but inflation is just as high abroad. Swiss people on modest or average incomes may stay in Switzerland because they can find affordable Airbnb accommodation there.”
According to the TCS barometer, 33% of respondents said they had had to adapt their plans because of the economic situation. Is travel becoming a form of luxury reserved for those who can afford it?
“Travel has always been correlated with social class,” Tissot replied. “But today there’s a real risk that it will become a luxury for the privileged. To understand this, we also need to consider the environmental dimension. As we know, tourism is one of the sectors that has the greatest impact on the climate and nature, with billions of people travelling by plane, damaging sites and so on. By taking restrictive measures to reduce the number of visitors, as we’ve seen in Venice, Barcelona or the Cinque Terre [in Italy], for example, prices go up. This is a rather contradictory trend. We may be returning to a 19th-century pattern, where only the well-to-do could afford holidays, whereas the 20th century opened up the opposite: it was time for democratisation, paid holidays and holiday villages.”
How about the train – more specifically, the night train, something close to my heart which I’ve written about on several occasions? “The big problem with the train,” according to Tissot, “is that, as a form of public transport, it has terrible competition: the car. Both cover roughly the same distances. The car has the great advantage – which made it so successful in the 20th century – of containing the illusion of independence and freedom. However, I believe that with traffic overloads, it has exhausted all its assets. The train has an advantage: you can talk and sleep on it. If we’re to make rail attractive again, we need to make it attractive not only through the fare, but also through the rest of the supply chain (the hotels, the destination). Unfortunately, prices are rising in Switzerland. The fact remains that the train has its cards, and if it knows how to play them, there will certainly be a shift from car to rail, because people will eventually get fed up with the former.”
Rents for flats in Zurich, Switzerland’s business capital, are reaching stratospheric levels. One reason for this is Google’s international campus. Its employees earn huge salaries, and they are driving up rents.
Christophe (not his real name), a 40-year-old French-speaking entrepreneur living in Zurich, became the father of a baby girl a few months ago. He and his wife started looking for a flat for their family. “We went to look at a five-room apartment, which cost CHF5,500 ($6,000) a month,” he says. “We thought that at that price we’d be entitled to a private viewing. Not at all. There were 80 people queuing at the foot of the building.”
One factor in the accelerating gentrification of Switzerland’s largest city is the development of the largest Google research centre outside the United States. Its presence is fuelling a constant influx of highly qualified expatriates. The property market has adapted to their needs.
A glance at Homegate, a rental portal, shows that a large number of properties are aimed at single people with very high purchasing power, typically tech-savvy young people. Aside from Google, this type of skilled worker is employed by international law firms, insurers Swiss Re and Zurich and the accountancy firms PwC and EY.
In District 4, home to nightclubs and bars but also prostitution and crime, a 12-square-metre furnished apartment is advertised for CHF2,100 a month. A 2.5-room penthouse is on offer for CHF4,275 a month. At the luxury end of the market, a 515-square-metre loft with indoor swimming pool in the heart of the city is seeking a tenant willing to pay CHF26,565 a month.
The city of Zurich says it’s aware of the “risk” that very high housing prices will drive the middle classes out of the city centre. But the factor exacerbating the situation in Zurich is not unavoidable. Berlin has proven this. In 2019 Google decided against opening a campus in the hip district of Kreuzberg, which had already fallen prey to property speculation. This decision followed two years of protests from locals. Unlike Madrid, Warsaw or Seoul, the German capital put the fate of its tenants ahead of the economic growth that a Google campus would bring.
More
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
