With an increasing demand for trained personnel in the hospitality industry, top Swiss hospitality and hotel management institutes are wooing students from India.
Les Roches International School of Hotel Management and Glion Institute of Higher Education, two of the world’s top hospitality and hotel management schools based in Switzerland, have been for the past few years holding seminars and other programmes in different cities in India to educate the students as well as parents on the growing prospects in the industry worldwide.
“For the past few years there has been an increasing thrust on India, which has a large young population,” said Sarosh Daruwalla, counsellor of Les Roches Institute.
The institutes had conducted education seminars in Chennai, Bangalore Mumbai and Pune last year, where hundreds of students and their parents participated, he said.
“Our efforts are also paying off. If we used to have two or three students from India for the courses in the mid-1980s, now the numbers have gone up with each batch having 30 to 40 students from the country,” he said.
According to Ganesh Kohli, education counsellor of Glion Institute of Higher Education, during the past four years, more than 150 Indian students pursued international hospitality management education at Les Roches and Glion.
Pimo Mazurczak, regional admission director, for Glion and Les Roches, Switzerland, said: “The traditional Indian view of the hospitality sector has undergone a huge change and graduates from our schools are in high demand in the travel, hotel, restaurant, cruise-ship sectors and even large corporate houses. We have found that Indian students
educated at Les Roches and Glion find excellent career opportunities in India as well as in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America.”
“The mindset of Indians towards hospitality industry is changing. There is a lot of awareness about the prospects of the sector among the students not only in the metro cities, but also in smaller towns and cities. Surprisingly, many of the students in these institutes, come from small towns in India,” said Daruwalla.
The rapidly growing Rs 160 trillion global travel and hospitality sector needs large number of trained personnel, he said.
According to World Travel and Tourism Council, by 2013 India will be the third-largest tourism market in the world. The domestic hospitality sector is likely to see investments of over $11 billion in the next two years with 40 international hotel brands making their
presence in the country in the next few years. The Indian hospitality sector is expected to grow to Rs 15 trillion in the next ten years.