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In the Footsteps of Great Personalities

5 Generations of Family tradition

The Hotel Schweizerhof is all about history. Each of the 101 rooms is dedicated to one of the many famous guests who have stayed here in the past 170 years. The hotel was awarded the Milestone Award 2014, the most important Swiss Tourism prize.

Would you like to experience an important day in the work of Richard Wagner? Then stay in ROOM 7 at the HOTEL SCHWEIZERHOF LUZERN and imagine that it is the 6th of August 1859. You have been a guest at the hotel since the end of March in order to complete your opera "TRISTAN UND ISOLDE." Musically speaking, the first weeks since arriving in Luzern were not very productive. You caught a cold and the hotel Manager, Eduard Segesser, suggested a very special therapy for you, riding lessons on the 25 year old mare "Lise." You enjoyed rides up on the Rigi, towards Pilatus and Seelisberg. You visited the coachman Alois Z'Graggen, and also Jakob Josef Zelger, the landscape painter whose clients include Queen Victoria, in his hotel garden workshop. You need company and fascinate people with your soliloquy over your vision of a complete work of art with composition, music and direction. Your music exerts the same hypnotic power over others too. Your friend, Franz Liszt, sent you a 24 year old composer, Felix Draeseke, with whom, on long rides, you could exchange musical ideas and discussions. Today, a ride is also planned. However, you have now been sitting at the piano for six hours and are concentrating harder than ever before on your composing. "Wait a moment," you ask Felix Daeseke, when he comes to get you, "The Tristan is almost finished", "Then I have to be here", he says, watching as you write the final few bars and round off with the initial note of the last chord. It is 4.30pm. You have completed a masterpiece of romantic music. Such a world wide success has not emerged from every room of the hotel. However, in every room, guests will find testimonies of great personalities who have lain there in the past 170 years: Winston Churchill, Kaiser Wilhelm II, BB King, Anastacia and James Blunt. For this staging, the Hotel Schweizerhof was awarded the Milestone Award, the highest accolade in the Swiss tourism industry and produced a book about it. It bears the title "Where Luzern makes history" and includes all 120 stories from the rooms and public spaces of the hotel.