PHOTO: The world’s mover and shakers are headed to Davos this week for the World Economic Forum. (Wiki Images)

Davos has become to finance what Cannes is to film.

This week (Jan. 21-25) the World Economic Forum is attracting 2,600 of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world of finance to Davos.

The forum has bestowed a celebrity status to both the players who each paid $250,000 each to participate and top the town of Davos, which has become to finance what Cannes is to film.

While Allen Greenspan on the red carpet may not rock your world as much as Jennifer Lawrence or George Clooney, they have certainly rocked the world of Davos. The Forum has certainly led to the opening of the InterContinental Davos Hotel, one of a new generation of hotels that is changing the face of Swiss hospitality.

Big meetings are nothing new to Switzerland. Geneva practically invented the concept, but Davos is something very different. Contrasts, between Davos and Geneva, point to a new direction in Swiss destination marketing. Increasingly, Switzerland is developing a nucleus of radically futuristic hotels that run in strong contrast to the charming traditional family run property that has characterized Swiss hospitality for generations. There’s nothing quaint about dynamic Davos.

These two branches of Swiss brand imagery are emerging as complimentary values in a much richer, more complex Swiss brand. While the Forum seems to be challenging the mother city of global conventions Geneva, it’s not in the lead.

According to Philippe Vignon, the director of Geneva Tourism, “Davos does a great job hosting the Forum, but the World Economic Forum (the Forum’s mother ship) is actually headquartered in Geneva. I believe the DEF attracts about 3,000 attendees every year, Geneva conventions attract a number closer to 3 million such visitors.”

In all of this the discussion is only a discussion of style not quality. The quality of Swiss hotels, modern or traditional, is well established. The World Economic Forum classified Switzerland as “the world’s most competitive travel destination” in its Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2013. The report gave Swiss hotels top marks for its excellent staff thanks to the availability of qualified labor.

“That staff,” said Vignon, “is high quality but expensive in terms of labor cost, a factor that encourages hotels to use family staff whenever possible.”

The cost of Swiss labor is making it increasingly difficult for family run hotels to pay staff and make the sort of investments in hardware necessary to stay on the cutting edge in European hospitality. New money from the Swiss financial sector, from Asia and the Middle East, attracted by Switzerland’s political and financial stability, is behind the wave of new properties like the InterContinental Davos.

Switzerland also softened some of the regulations that had made it difficult for non-Swiss investors in the past to get involved. With those regulations lifted there are currently more than 9,000 rooms under construction in Switzerland.

Geneva is positioned to continue as the center of meetings and conventions in Switzerland thanks to its hotel inventory and the critical mass of global institutions headquartered in the city. “Nearly a third of our hotels,” said Vignon, “are on the five star level and some 25 percent of the really large international organizations, like the U.N. and other nongovernmental organizations, have buildings in Geneva.”

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