EHL Bachelor students in the final semester of their studies are asked to complete 3 elective courses.
During these 6 weeks, students will learn how to analyze, manage, and improve service processes throughout the value chain, ultimately to add value to the firm. They will extend the knowledge and solution sets to organizational challenges they acquired in previous semesters with specialist knowledge in their desired elective field.
Upon successful completion of this module, students will have acquired specialist knowledge and be able to analyze, evaluate, and recommend organizational actions in their area of choice.
Elective courses
The list of elective courses below is indicative. Courses offered in any particular semester may (and do) change in response to the industry evolution.
Hospitality Mergers & Acquisitions
The objective of this course is to undertake a rigorous presentation of the strategic and financial rationales, valuation methodologies and transaction considerations and tactics followed by industry participants and financial institutions (such as private equity firms) to acquire or sell hospitality businesses.
Students will learn about deal process management and review key commercial and legal terms in connection with public offers and private transactions.
Developing Entrepreneurial Projects
The purpose of this course is to allow student to master the different steps that are necessary to develop an entrepreneurial project. These steps rely on the application and integration of interdisciplinary concepts that have been learned in previous classes (marketing, finance, strategy and operations).
The course helps also to assess the factors that favor the emergence of business opportunities and the abilities entrepreneurs need to demonstrate in order to capture them.
Innovation Management
In this case study-based elective, we will discuss the strategic role that innovation plays in today's business environment. We will use frameworks and identify 'best practices' in innovation management by investigating the real-world challenges that established companies and startups face when trying to create and sustain competitive advantage. Beyond hotels and restaurants, we will look at business stories coming from the world of cosmetics, electronics, software, toys, and fashion.
The key concepts we will cover include: business model innovation, new product development processes, lead user method, job-to-be-done approach, lean startup, disruptive innovation, scenario analysis, real options, diffusion of innovations, and design thinking.
Hospitality Luxury Brand Management
By the end of this elective students will have acquired a real understanding of the concept of luxury, the key rules and characteristics that define it and how to recognize and apply these in the context of the hospitality and services industry.
They will have learned how to market luxury brands based on a luxury marketing model following specific rules that define a it vs. traditional marketing approaches; and the strategic choices required to follow a luxury strategy vs. a premium or fashion model. Students will learn how to respond to challenges facing luxury brands in view of the social, cultural and economic changes affecting the luxury industry globally, democratization and the emergence of new definitions of luxury.
Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Innovations
Traditional hospitality management can be overly short-term focused, so understand how to tie corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability to long-term success indicators is of upmost importance for successful leaders. This course addresses one of the most pressing issues facing our industry today: how to develop innovative sustainable business models and solutions to challenges in relation to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Quadruple Bottom Line approach: planet, people, profit and purpose.
The course will provide a forum, on the one hand, to discuss applied innovative subjects and, the other, options to help students understand – no matter which side of the debate they are on – how to engage with relevant actors to establish common ground and produce positive outcomes for the future. The course will include lectures, a series of experienced executives as guest speakers, interactive case discussions, and visits to leading-edge sustainable companies and research labs.
Strategic Hotel Investments
In this course, students are put through a bespoke multi-day experience that simulates the real world of hotel investment. The students will use concepts in a series of interactive in-class role-playing games during which they will act as hotel owners, developers and/ consultants and during which they will receive coaching/feedback from visiting executives who actually do this in the real world.
The course teaches students how to think about financial numbers, not how to calculate them. The focus is on teaching students how to think and act like hotel owners and real estate investors in a fun, innovative and challenging way.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing provides, firstly, a foundation for how and why new digital media are changing the marketing landscape. These media, e.g. the internet, mobile devices, are changing the marketing concepts of time, distance, experience and social connections.
Students will investigate the opportunities, threats and issues that impact on this digital environment and further review the role of the Internet, and other technologies, on the marketing mix of hospitality products and services in creating value propositions for customers and strategic opportunities and competitive advantage for organization by extending and developing new e-business models.
Students will build on critical areas, such as an improved quality of the digital experience, and exploit strategic opportunities to provide personalization and dynamic interaction with the customer. Students will further explore the implications of implementing a digital marketing strategy.
Cross-cultural Hospitality Management
The hospitality industry undergoes permanent changes and its dynamics such as new destinations/stakeholders, emerging global/local specificities and innovative trends make the hospitality sector more and more complex. This course will focus on hospitality management from a socio-anthropological perspective that will develop socially and culturally responsible competences for the students as future hotel managers.
Wine Economics & Finance
The goal of this course is to provide students with the necessary tools to examine the functioning of the market for fine wines and to rigorously analyze the performance of a fine wine investment. Students will first explore the world most renowned wine producing regions and study the specificities of the wines produced in each of these regions. They will study how fine wines are initially released on the market (primary market) and how they are subsequently traded (secondary market).
Students will then review the determinants of wine prices and investigate the performance of an investment in fine wines. This analysis will include a review of financial tools that are commonly used for performance assessment. In the last part of the course, students will have to deal with specific, yet crucial, issues that are related to wine investments.
Influence & Leadership: Negotiation & Communication Tools
As future managers, students will need to be able to put in place relevant strategies of influence and persuasion. Knowing how to use these strategies will help students develop leadership skills and will be useful in negotiation and communication situations. The development of competences related to influence and persuasion will boost students’ performance whether communicating or engaged in negotiations.
Furthermore, students' social and personal skills will also be developed, thus enhancing their leadership abilities. Indeed, leadership is defined as the ability to motivate and bring people together, but the ability to influence and negotiate is also an essential part of being a successful leader.
Brand storytelling – Thinking beyond products and services
Storytelling is often praised as the ultimate marketing tool. Whether it is to advertise a product, motivate your employees or rally people behind a common cause. In the hospitality industry, many hotels are turning to storytelling in search for a solution to rising OTAs’ commissions, growth of Air BnB and changing customer behaviour.
But what is a “brand story” exactly, how do you develop a great one and to implement it?
In this elective students will develop a deep understanding of the power of storytelling in business and yourself. They will learn how to think a story beyond product/services features and concretely craft a complete product/service narrative using the Brand Story CanvasTM.
