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MBA for Hospitality and Service Industries: Course Catalog
Curriculum Overview
Fall semester
The Human Advantage
A look into the self and teams
Before you can lead a team, a brand, or a transformation, you need to understand what drives you and what gets in your way. The fall semester is a structured journey inward. You will examine your values, biases, emotional triggers, and the stories you tell about yourself and others. You will learn why smart, well-intentioned managers still make poor decisions, misjudge situations, and struggle to build trust under pressure.
In this semester, we have an immersive week in Lausanne, where students tackle a live challenge on customer-centric innovation using design thinking.
By the end of this semester, you will have a clearer picture of who you are as a leader and a concrete plan for who you want to become. This is the foundation on which everything else is built.
The Inner Work of Leadership: The Self & The Team
From Data to Impact: Evidence-Based Decision Making
Decoding Mental Maps: Behavioral Insights for Managers
What does it mean to lead in the age of AI when algorithms can outperform humans in strategy, forecasting, and diagnosis? This course starts with a question most MBA programs skip: what is a leader that an algorithm cannot be?
Through the story of Lea, a fictional general manager navigating identity crises, team breakdowns, and high-pressure decisions, students explore the human foundations of leadership. Each week, you diagnose her situation with your own instincts, then receive the theoretical framework, and re-analyze with new eyes.
You will examine your own values, personality, and emotional triggers through 360-degree feedback, individual journals, and one-on-one executive coaching sessions. You will learn how trust is built and destroyed in interactions, why meaning gets lost between people, and how to lead through contradiction and uncertainty without losing yourself.
The course closes with an unusual group assignment: student teams write and film a new episode of Lea's story, embedding everything they have learned into a single coherent narrative. Because the deepest test of understanding is the capacity to teach. Key themes: identity and authenticity under pressure, emotional acumen and self-regulation, trust and relational credibility, sensemaking and storytelling in change, ethical leadership, team dynamics.
Faculty: Bertrand Audrin | Stefano Borzillo | Sowon Kim
Leaders are drowning in data and starving for insight. This course develops one of the most valuable skills in complex organizations: turning information, whether quantitative, qualitative, or ambiguous, into decisions that hold up under scrutiny. Students learn to question their own assumptions, recognize where analytical models fall short, and build reasoning that is rigorous without pretending certainty where none exists.
The course draws directly on real challenges from participants' professional lives, making the learning immediately applicable. You will develop fluency in evidence-based frameworks, learn to communicate complex findings to diverse audiences, and practice making sound judgments under time pressure and incomplete information. That is the reality of every senior role in hospitality and service.
Faculty: Nicole Hinrichs | Matthias Fuchs | Adam Aoun
Managers do not make decisions in a vacuum. They decide under pressure, with incomplete information, surrounded by organizational politics, cognitive blind spots, and competing interests.
This course investigates how decisions are actually made inside organizations and what leaders can do to make better ones. Rather than teaching idealized decision models, it exposes the gap between rational theory and behavioral reality. Students audit a real hiring decision they have made. They analyze a real meeting they have sat in. They examine why groups so often make worse decisions than individuals, and learn practical techniques to counteract groupthink, escalation of commitment, and hidden agenda dynamics in team settings.
Beyond individual choices, the course examines how incentive structures, organizational design, and bureaucratic constraints shape behavior at a systemic level. Students leave with sharper judgment and far greater self-awareness about the patterns they tend to fall into when decisions really matter. Key themes: cognitive biases and how to spot them in yourself, behavioral economics applied to management, team decision-making processes and their failure modes, running meetings that actually produce decisions, organizational design and incentive alignment.
Faculty: Sebastien Fernandez | Isabella Blengini | Frode Hvaring
Spring Semester
Shaping New Horizons
A look into organizations and industries
In this semester, the lens is outward. The focus is on how you read and shape the world around you. Students learn to navigate organizational complexity and strategic ambiguity, to build and execute visions that outlast the initial burst of inspiration, and to think like entrepreneurs who combine bold ideas with real financial discipline.
This semester has the Singapore Immersive Week, where students tackle a live digital transformation challenge in one of the world's most sophisticated service economies
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Three Courses, 21 Weeks
Spring Semester
Charting the Uncharted: Managing in a Shifting Landscape
From Vision to Execution: Strategy, Structure & Culture
Venture Hospitality: Creating and Evaluating Experiences
The world hospitality professionals operate in has changed profoundly. Digital disruption, geopolitical volatility, shifting consumer expectations, sustainability imperatives, and AI-driven competition are reshaping what it means to lead a service organization.
This course equips leaders to read that landscape clearly and act decisively despite uncertainty. Students explore how macro-level forces including economic cycles, regulatory change, technological shifts, and cultural dynamics translate into real threats and real opportunities for service-oriented organizations. They develop scenario planning skills, practice adaptive strategy, and examine how the organizations that thrive in turbulence are structured and led differently from those that get caught flat-footed.
This is not a course about following trends. It is about developing the situational intelligence and strategic confidence to lead when the map keeps changing.
Faculty: Natalia Bovsovers | Frederic Delley | Yariv Levy
Most strategic plans fail not because the strategy was wrong, but because the organization was not built to execute it. This course tackles the gap that derails even the best-intentioned leaders: the distance between vision and reality. Students examine how organizational structure, culture, incentive systems, and decision-making processes either reinforce or undermine strategic intent. (More details to come)
Faculty: Laura Zizka | Stefan Güldenberg | Deep Parekh
This course answers a question every ambitious professional eventually faces: how do you take a great idea and build something real from it?
Working through two parallel live ventures running across all seven weeks, one with manageable risk and one with deep uncertainty, students apply entrepreneurial thinking to the full journey: spotting unmet needs before competitors do, designing experiences that genuinely move guests, building business models that can scale, stress-testing financial assumptions, and ultimately making a GO or No-GO decision with real conviction.
The course blends entrepreneurship, experience design, and finance into one integrated challenge. Students are coached by entrepreneur Alma Escobar on mindset and pitch communication. Three faculty disciplines converge each week to push teams past the comfortable answers. The course ends with a 2-minute investor pitch: the clearest possible test of whether an idea deserves to exist.
Key themes covered week by week: designing opportunities rather than discovering them, market research without an existing product, crafting extraordinary experiences using positive psychology and behavioral economics, business model innovation (including asset-light, platform, and subscription models), building a financial model from scratch, valuation under uncertainty and real options thinking, exit strategy, and communicating ideas with clarity and persuasion.
Faculty: Margarita Cabrera | Alessandro Inversini | Philippe Masset
Specializations
Claiming New Grounds
Students choose one of three specialization tracks, each comprising four courses over 16 weeks. Specialization courses are taught by one expert per course. The semester also includes the Partner University Immersive Week and culminates with the Final Immersive Week in Lausanne and graduation.
Specialization 1: Shaping Hotel Management Strategies
Design future-ready management strategies that anticipate and navigate the forces reshaping the global hotel industry. This specialization equips you to optimize multi-property performance, build agile and sustainable business models, and leverage data, technology, and human-centric design to lead hotels in a fast-changing market.
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S1.1 |
Hotel Asset Management & Hospitality Value Creation The owner's lens on hotel performance: aligning operator and asset-owner interests, reading P&Ls and benchmarks, driving CapEx ROI, managing brand and management contracts, and engineering long-term value across the hold period.
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S1.2 |
Total Profit Management: From Rooms to Strategic Revenue Optimization Modern revenue science across rooms, F&B, spa, and ancillaries — pricing, segmentation, distribution, forecasting and channel economics — taught as an enterprise-wide discipline rather than a rooms-only function.
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S1.3 |
The Architecture of Experience-Led Hospitality Designing differentiated hospitality experiences that translate brand vision into guest journeys, F&B environments, service architecture, and operational ecosystems that enable experience-led properties to perform at their best. |
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S1.4 |
AI-Driven Hotel Transformation: Technology, Data & the Human Experience How AI, automation, and guest-data platforms reshape operations, personalization, and labor models — frameworks for selecting use cases, governing data, and balancing tech investment with the irreplaceable human dimension of hospitality. |
Specialization 2: Leading Luxury Experiences
Explore how luxury brands create desire and lasting impact through storytelling, craftsmanship, and exceptional service. You’ll learn to lead omnichannel experiences, manage high-value clients, and translate brand values into exceptional moments, positioning you to shape the future of luxury, where value is defined by depth, connection, and the ability to create lasting impact.
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S2.1 |
Luxury Codes: Desire, Identity & Brand Meaning An exploration of the behavioral, cultural, and branding dynamics that shape luxury perception across customers and markets — examining status, symbolism, aspiration, belonging, and identity formation, and translating these insights into brand positioning. |
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S2.2 |
Decoding Luxury: The Hidden Mechanics of Desirability Positions hospitality mindset — posture, etiquette, storytelling, multisensory staging — as the operating system that animates luxury experiences across organizations and touchpoints. From boutique retail to flagship stores. |
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S2.3 |
From Object to Experience Universe: Architecting Luxury Ecosystems How maisons extend beyond product into hospitality, gastronomy, wellness, culture, and lifestyle — designing extensions that reinforce rather than dilute brand equity, with the governance, talent, and economic models behind successful ecosystem plays. |
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S2.4 |
Luxury at the Frontier: AI, Digital Worlds & the Next Generation of Clients Understanding how digital culture, technology, and shifting expectations are reshaping luxury: Generative AI in creation and clienteling, virtual and phygital experiences, evolving definitions of value and exclusivity, and the behaviors of next-generation customers. |
Specialization 3: Spearheading Finance and Real-Estate Investments
Develop advanced investment, finance, and real-estate competencies while learning how capital flows into hospitality assets, deals are structured, and value is created through projects and portfolio strategies. With a focus on financial modeling, risk analysis, and ESG priorities, you’ll gain the strategic insight needed to assess opportunities and drive sustainable growth in global property and capital markets.
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S3.1 |
Portfolio Strategy: Capital Allocation & Investment Decision-making Building and managing a portfolio across geographies, segments, and risk profiles — capital allocation frameworks, hold/sell discipline, ESG integration, and the discipline of investment decision-making through macro and cyclical uncertainty. |
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S3.2 |
Real Estate Development & Investments The economics of real estate as an investable asset: site selection and project finance, debt and equity structuring, brand and operator contracts, REITs and listed vehicles as alternative entry points, and risk allocation across stakeholders in greenfield, conversion, and mixed-use projects. |
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S3.3 |
Feasibility & Investment Appraisal for Hospitality Assets Turning a concept into a bankable case: market and competitive analysis, demand modeling, financial feasibility, sensitivity and scenario testing, and risk-adjusted return frameworks — the toolkit to decide whether, where, and how to invest. |
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S3.4 |
Private Market Investing and Financing The financing engine behind investment: private equity strategies and fund structures, public versus private capital trade-offs, M&A and single-asset deals, refinancing and recapitalization, and risk management - how capital is raised, deployed, and returned.. |
Personal Project
The Personal Project is the culminating element of the MBA for Hospitality and Service Industries. Launched in parallel with the second specialization course, it marks the point at which students stop studying business problems and start solving them: each project must deliver demonstrable value for a real organization or stakeholder.
As the program's integrative assessment, it requires students to mobilize competences under coached conditions of consequence. In doing so, the Personal Project consolidates the developmental arc of the program, translating the inner foundation built in the Fall Semester, the strategic action sharpened in the Spring Semester, and the deepened expertise of the specialization track into a single, high-stakes piece of work that evidences the integrated profile of the MBA graduate.
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