check-in check-out

Our guests have the last word - rate your museum experience on TripAdvisor.

“Mr and Mrs Bond, 565 Fifth Avenue, New York, nice people – she’s a little crazy – booked the same rooms for next summer.” This is just one entry from among the 22,000 index cards on guests kept by the Waldhaus Vulpera grand hotel in Vulpera-Tarasp. The staff recorded details about their own patrons for decades. All their quirks and foibles were captured here, along with other observations. Only for internal use, of course. When the Waldhaus burned down to the ground in 1985, it marked the end of an era – but the guest records survived, preserved by the hotel’s last manager, Rolf Zollinger. In 2021, he published them in a book, which can now be purchased at our shop.

The exhibition “Check-in Check-out” not only presents a wonderful selection of index cards in their original form, it also continues the story through to the digital twenty-first century. Times have now changed, and today it is the guests who leave forthright evaluations of their hosts on social media channels, where the whole world can read them. In the exhibition we let hotel professionals have their say about what hospitality means these days. But the general public gets the last word, of course. Visitors can publicly evaluate their own experience of the exhibition on TripAdvisor. We’ll be reading it all!

Main partners
Kanton Bern, Bundesamt für Kultur, Stadt Bern, Schweizer Alpen-Club (SAC)

Project partners
Bank EEK, Carmine Home, Edition Patrick Frey, Hotellerie Suisse, Hotelarchiv Schweiz