Sommet Education and Hospitality Community Foundation announce a strategic partnership to advance training and sector intelligence in hospitality
- Sommet Education
Crans-Montana (Switzerland), October 7, 2025 – Sommet Education, the global leader in higher education for hospitality management with prestigious institutions such as Les Roches, Glion Institute of Higher Education and École Ducasse, has officially entered into a partnership with the Hospitality Community Foundation (HCommunity) through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed today at Les Roches Crans-Montana, ranked #2 worldwide in Hospitality and Leisure Management by the QS Universities Ranking by Subject 2025, host of the event.
This strategic alliance is built upon a shared ambition to combine academic expertise with real-time economic data to deliver tangible solutions to the current challenges faced by the hospitality and tourism industries.
A shared vision for a sustainable and equitable hospitality sector
This partnership reflects the strong commitment of both organizations to return data to the hands of hospitality professionals, guided by ethical and collaborative principles. By contributing to education, research, innovation, and territorial competitiveness, this initiative marks a new step toward a more sustainable industry ecosystem.
Florent Varanne, Head of Business Solutions Development at Sommet Education, is also joining HCommunity’s Academic Committee. This direct involvement ensures strategic alignment between the Foundation’s mission and Sommet Education’s academic priorities.
Real-time data only holds value when it serves a shared vision. Through this partnership with HCommunity, we have a unique opportunity to turn data into collective intelligence, for the benefit of destinations and the entire tourism ecosystem. Sommet Education is mobilizing its academic teams, faculty, researchers, and experts, to interpret, structure, and transmit this data in a useful and strategic way. In a world where destinations compete long before individual establishments do, the pooling of anonymized data becomes a powerful tool to anticipate demand, adapt offerings, and build lasting attractiveness. This partnership opens exciting perspectives to collectively advance performance, innovation, and fairness in hospitality.
Every day, thousands of professionals carry the hospitality industry on their shoulders. They deserve to fully benefit from the fruits of their labor. With HCommunity, our goal is to give them back control of this value, to help them move forward with greater clarity, better tools, and stronger recognition. The partnership with Sommet Education serves exactly that purpose: it directly supports those who keep this industry alive and allows us, together, to move an entire ecosystem forward toward greater collaboration, intelligence, and fairness.
Hosting the signing of this new strategic partnership at Les Roches Crans-Montana underscores our role as a hub for innovation, collaboration, and leadership in hospitality. Beyond hosting, our campus and students will actively contribute by creating videos and educational materials to help hoteliers understand and leverage the data generated by the HCommunity platform. By combining academic excellence, student engagement, and industry-driven innovation, we strengthen our position as a catalyst for impactful strategic projects and prepare our students and partners to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
A collaboration built on three key pillars
More specifically, this partnership focuses on three main areas: training around sector KPIs, applied research and educational projects, and the international deployment of the HCommunity platform.
Training around sector KPIs: Free webinars will be offered to help professionals understand and use the key indicators derived from the HCommunity platform. These sessions will be complemented by in-depth modules led by Sommet Education experts, integrated into the group’s B2B learning solutions.
Applied research and educational projects: Sommet Education will contribute to the Foundation’s projects through the development of case studies and research materials leveraging territorial data. This collaboration will strengthen academic transmission and foster pedagogical innovation.
International deployment of the HCommunity platform: The partnership also includes a joint expansion into key markets such as the Middle East and South Africa, with the creation of Data Lakes to support governments and businesses in structuring their tourism development based on real-time, shared data.
About Sommet Education
Sommet Education is the global leader in hospitality, luxury and culinary arts education and training. It unites five prestigious institutions – Glion Institute of Higher Education, Les Roches Global Hospitality, École Ducasse, Invictus Education and Indian School of Hospitality - that shape the future of the industry and nurture the next generation of talent.
With over 400 programs spanning from technical training to undergraduate and graduate degrees, executive education and business solutions, we support 20,000 students and learners across 10 countries and over 20 campuses as well as through cutting-edge online learning platforms.
Backed by a global network of 60,000 alumni and an industry-driven curriculum, Sommet Education prepares the future leaders who will set new standards of excellence in hospitality and beyond. To further this mission, the Sommet Education Foundation was created to expand access to quality hospitality education for underprivileged students, fostering an even more inclusive and diverse industry.
For more information: www.sommet-education.com
About HCommunity Foundation
The HCommunity Foundation is revolutionizing the use of data in hospitality and tourism. As an independent Swiss foundation, it is transforming the way data is handled—giving control back to hotels, restaurants, and destinations—and turning their data into drivers of performance, equity, and innovation.
HCommunity operates the world’s first data lake fully dedicated to hospitality and tourism. It connects all industry stakeholders—private and public, technological, economic, and academic—through a unique shared-data platform designed to generate high-impact collective intelligence.
Hotels, restaurants, and tourism operators joining the Foundation gain free access to real-time market data through the Market Watch platform, allowing them to anticipate trends, refine strategies, improve competitiveness, and face industry challenges with greater confidence.
Beyond that, HCommunity enables organizations, destinations, and associations to create their own benchmarks, develop data-connected applications, and leverage high-value anonymized insights. Its ethical and transparent model ensures that revenue generated from anonymized data is shared with contributors and reinvested in the industry.
The Foundation also supports research, innovation, and education initiatives through strategic partnerships with leading academic institutions such as Sommet Education—working together to build the future of hospitality.
