BMCC 2008 Switzerland Blog

Friday, June 08, 2008

(Day 8: Tour Guide – Adrienne Kennick)

Andermatt and the La Claustra Hotel – Itinerary

6:15am: Wake-up call for all rooms
7:00-7:20am: Breakfast (school dining room)
7:22am: Group departs for bus station
7:29am: Bus departs for Chur (arrives 7:42am)
7:42am: Group continues to train station
7:56am: Train departs for Disentis/Muster (arrives 9:11am)
9:19am: Train departs for Andermatt (arrives 10:25am)
10:25am: Group continues to taxi stand (taxi prebooked)
10:30am: Via taxi, group continues to La Claustra Hotel (arrive 11am)
11am: Presentation of Mr. Sawiri’s project followed by hotel tour
followed by refreshment (included)
1pm: (Intended) group depart via taxi for Andermatt
1:30pm: Group explore Andermatt (Attraction TBA)
3:20pm: Group assembly at Train Station
3:30pm: Train departs for Disentis/Muster (arrives 4:42pm)
4:45pm: Train departs for Chur (arrives 6:02pm)
6:02-6:55pm: Free time in Chur
6:55pm: Group assembly at bus station
7:05pm: Bus departs for SSTH (arrives 7:15pm)
8:30pm: Dinner (school restaurant)

Lessons Learned:

1. If as a tour guide you are handed an itinerary, do not trust that it is complete and accurate. Check the information, confirm that you understand the routes and transportation, and (where applicable) confirm with the destinations that they are expecting your group.

2. Check with the person who prepared the itinerary and with the destinations to see whether they are expecting to be paid! There was a bit of a shock for me as we were wrapping up our visit to the hotel: not only had the (prebooked) taxi not been paid for, the hotel itself was expecting payment for the coffee and tea served to us when we arrived (the itinerary I was given said that refreshment was “included” – I took this to mean “paid for”, not “part of the day and subject to fees”), and to top it all off the hotel’s bill offered charges for our guided tour, the presentation, and the use of a projector and laptop in said presentation! (In fact, the hotel was expecting to submit its own charges as well as a bill for reimbursement (they paid the taxi driver for the roundtrip) directly to SSTH, and not to our group as we left – but it was still quite a surprise.)

3. As our textbook says, be ready to be flexible. I could have insisted on completing our tour as written, leading the group in a cold rain through the village of Andermatt and out to the Devil’s Bridge and back… …and they would have been wet and cold and miserable and annoyed. Instead I changed the itinerary to suit the weather and needs of the group, and everyone was happier with the day.

Best-laid plans and a thawing Hotel…

Written by: Adrienne Kennick

(Looks like a long day, doesn’t it?)My alarm went off at 6am (it didn’t wake my roommate), by 6:15 I was dressed and making the rounds of the rooms to be sure everyone was getting ready. I returned to my room, reset my alarm, checked that my roommate’s alarm was set (for 6:30am), and went back to bed. At 6:30 she woke up, at 6:50 I took my portfolio and my book bag and headed for the dining room. I was the first to arrive, but the rest of the group was there at 7am, when breakfast was scheduled to begin. By 7:20 we were wrapping up, by 7:25 we were on our way to catch the bus. At the train station, our designated photographers took pictures, and our designated information gatherers checked with one of the train crew to confirm which car we should sit in, and which station was our connecting station. Everything was very smooth, and a lady on the train who spoke only German tried to ask me a question – I guess because I really looked like a Tour Guide!

Andermatt, Switzerland

Once in Andermatt I had no trouble finding our waiting taxi van, and we took an otherworldly half-hour drive up into the mountains on a winding cobblestone road through very thick white fog. At the end of that half hour, the taxi pulled up into a little parking area that looked like absolutely nothing, and led us across a graveled way to a large and forbidding door. We walked down a long passage that was dark and concrete and wet and so cold that our breath misted in the air. When I looked up, I saw thin icesicles hanging from the ceiling. A few of us had flashlights and were glad of the extra light, but the driver walked as if the space were well-lit and dry. At the end of the corridor we found a lobby-lounge area with a shiny black floor, rough-rock walls, furniture that would have been quite at home in a New York City club, and a glassed-in restaurant with pale walls, blond wood tables and floors, and wait staff in familiar dressy-casual black attire.

The La Claustra Hotel

The Hotel La Claustra is very small (17 bedrooms, one restaurant with two rooms, and two conference rooms) and very unique: it is entirely underground (carved out of a mountain), in caverns and passages which were once a Swiss army base. In the winter it is not open. In the spring, the entire place suffers from thawing – melt-water runs down the walls and is collected in gutters at the edges of the floor, and until the outside temperature warms up the inside of the hotel is anywhere from cool to icy. There is no front desk, and just seven or so staff members to handle the typical front-desk, bellhop, concierge and management responsibilities. The hotel’s guests are almost all from Europe and Japan, and the space is a blend of the sparse yet elegant Swiss/Scandinavian style and more Eastern accents such as rock gardens and art objects.

Due to local laws, the hotel was not permitted to install bathrooms within the new bedrooms, so the bathrooms, tubs, and showers are shared and in the style of an upscale spa or gym (though the facilities are also coed – a la Ally McBeal). There are no televisions in the rooms, and no windows to the outside world. To combat the possibility of claustrophobia, every door contains a glass panel (frosted for the bathrooms) to remind that there is at least another room or passage beyond. For privacy in the bedrooms, the clear glass may be hidden behind a rolling clothes and luggage rack. Having this rather than a shade or curtain means that it’s very obvious when the room is occupied and does not wish to be disturbed, versus when it is vacant or occupied but willing to open to service.

In addition to our tour of the hotel, we were treated to a presentation on the resort underway down in the valley of Andermatt. It will revitalize the area, providing tourism income to replace the overland trade-route income lost with the implementation of more efficient (and less proximate) underground trains. The designs are both ecologically and location- friendly, with a few buildings being constructed within the village of Andermatt, and the bulk of the resort being constructed on two shooting ranges outside of Andermatt purchased from the Swiss military. A golf course is to be built on outlying farmland, but the remaining open space in the valley and on the mountain slopes is not to be built on – preserving the beauty of the landscape and maintaining open space is a key element of the construction. What impressed me the most is the length the designers are going to in order to make the new resort “fit in” with the existing villages design of the region: not only will the new buildings have similar designs, but multiple architects have been hired to draft plans for them, further ensuring that once everything is built the resort will seem like a natural extension of Andermatt – buildings and roads which grew naturally over the generations, just as the village of Andermatt itself expanded and developed new styles over time. Also, while the initial phase of construction is quite aggressive (and quick), once the resort opens (scheduled for 2014) it could be as many as twenty years before it is fully complete – the designers anticipate that the destination will evolve over time.

When the tour and presentation were over (about 40 minutes) the hotel’s manager and I had thought we would be departing. (We had discussed with each other how long it might take to tour the hotel and see the presentation, but each went longer than expected). We piled into the waiting taxi van and headed back down the mountain (incidentally, the entrance to La Claustra is 2050 meters above sea level, and the main body of the hotel is covered by another 80 meters of mountain) to Andermatt (1400 meters above sea level). We returned to the train station surrounded by a cold rain, and a horror-movie mist. A unanimous group vote nixed attempting sight-seeing in Andermatt, and instead we checked the train schedules and left on earlier trains. My group of 14 diminished to just 8 on the route back to Chur, with 3 students departing from Andermatt to Geneva for the weekend, and another 3 students heading to Lucerne.

I had fun guiding for the day, the more so because La Claustra was (for me) one of the most exciting places on our three-week itinerary, and especially because the entire group was working with me and staying focused. We didn’t have stragglers or wanderers, and we had photographers and fact-finders ready and willing to help.

My leanings in the travel and tourism sphere have always been more aligned with hospitality (so of course I’m excited by a unique hotel), and while I like seeing new places I often dislike the time and trouble it takes to reach them (especially because I don’t like sitting still for long periods). Part of my learning on this trip is to realize that I might also really like on-site or city guiding, where the format is that people come to the guide, and then the guide shows them a specific place or area. The tour escorting and trip guiding (where the tour guide travels with a group for several days or even a few weeks), is probably not for me – though I think with a little more study I could do the job if I had to.