Gothhard Tunnel Opens; Card Payments Vex Taxi Drivers; AirBnB Makes Swiss Tourism Inroads; BaselLand Insists Students and Teachers Shake Hands

News For 31 May 2016         The long awaited Gotthard Base Tunnel is set to officially open tomorrow, June 1.  Once open, the 57 kilometer long tunnel will be the longest in the world surpassing, the 53 kilometer Seikan tunnel in Japan.  In addition to its length, the tunnel was bored into a mountain 2300 meters below its peak, making it the deepest tunnel as well.  The tunnel is part of a greater plan to enhance the rail system servicing freight and passenger traffic between northern and southern Europe.  Once open for service, passenger rail travel time between Basel and Milan is estimated to be reduced by close to an hour, and the freight train capacity will increase from 180 to 260 per day.  Built at a cost of 12.2 billion Francs, the tunnel will be in a testing phase once opened until full operations commence December 1 this year.     *****************   Mobile telephone service operator Swisscom removed a signal tower facility in early May at the Euro-Airport which is now causing major headaches for Taxi drivers.  An unintended side-effect has been the loss of signal required by the taxis' portable card payment systems.  Taxi drivers rely heavily on the card readers provided by the Swiss firm SIX Payment Services, which in turn relies on its mobile signal from SwissCom.  According to drivers, most of their fares are business travelers that prefer to use credit cards for payment.  With the loss of signal the service has become unreliable, often leaving passengers grumbling as they search their pockets for the taxi fare.  No word from Swisscom regarding the fracas, and SIX Payment Services has only managed to offer a work-around of enabling the roaming feature on their card reading devices, which do not appear to be as reliable.  It seems the best idea for now is to carry plenty of cash when catching a taxi ride to the EuroAirport.  

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Swiss hotels are looking forward to a bounce in tourism thanks to a revived economy and a weakening franc, coinciding with the summer travel season.  After also enduring a multi-year stretch of late season snow which hampered the revenues from skiing holiday makers, a new threat has also come on the scene in the form of AirBnB - the internet based flat and house sharing service.  According to research done by the news agency SDA, lodging available to let on AirBnB is typically half the price of similar rooms in the cities of Zurich and Geneva.  Most impacted are hotels in the 2-3 star range, where the upper echelon of hotels appear to be competing well thanks to the range of additional services they tend to provide.  In resort areas as well, the service is putting pressure on traditional hotels and realtors.  In the Valais, famous for its ski resorts, AirBnB accounted for 23% of available beds in the market compared to 13 percent a year ago according to the Valais Tourism Observatory.

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A Therwil secondary school has been the focus of a controversy involving two male muslim students and a teacher at the school.  The fracas erupted when the students, citing religious restrictions, refused to shake their teacher's hand, a customary and apparently required practice in Swiss Schools.  When the school granted a special dispensation to the two students, the BaselLand court system, at the behest of Cantonal school authorities intervened - and overturned the school's decision.  Citing a thorough legal analysis, they issued a statement saying, "the public interest is best served by placing gender equality and the integration of foreigners, ahead of the religious freedom of students".  Now, parents of children who do not comply with the rules could face fines as high as 5000 Francs.  European and Swiss schools have been confronting a rising wave of similar issues as they try to integrate arriving refugees.