Best hotels in Lausanne, Switzerland | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays

Welcome to PressBeyond, the ultimate curated visual guide for design-driven hotels! My name is Will Miller and these are my recommendations for the best boutique and luxury hotels in Lausanne, Switzerland.

I am the founder of PressBeyond and I am an ultra-meticulous hotel curator who loves clean visuals. I have individually analyzed and tiered each hotel included in this guide based on a variety of criteria (architecture & design, location, brand & brand affiliation, existing reviews, and my own personal experiences), and importantly, I have hand-selected the leading imagery for each hotel to provide you with easily-digestible, yet detailed and complete, like-for-like, high-level visual profiles. I felt this summarization step was a critical missing piece across existing guides, blogs, and booking platforms. My aim is to make it easier for people to identify hotel environments that resonate with them, along with enabling them to visualize the types of social experiences that those environments help foster. My brain doesn't work when exposed to cluttered content, so my goal was to create the opposite.

Underneath this, we are also a full booking engine offering 5% Venmo cash back along with other exclusive perks. For all of you design-obsessed hotel enthusiasts out there, I hope this guide helps get you to where you see yourself!

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Lausanne, Switzerland

Ouchy is where Lausanne comes down to meet the water. The city itself climbs steeply from Lac Léman — Gothic cathedral at the summit, funicular threading between levels, everything tilted toward altitude — and Ouchy, its lakeshore district, operates by a different logic entirely: horizontal, composed, facing south toward the Alps across the water. It is in this quieter precinct that both of Lausanne's properties on this platform are rooted, and the choice between them is less about comfort level than about which form of grandeur speaks to you. The Beau Rivage Palace occupies a category almost unto itself. Opened in 1861 and expanded over decades, it is one of the great Belle Époque lakeside hotels of the Swiss Riviera — a category that includes the Montreux Palace and the Royal Savoy Montreux but that finds its most imposing expression here, in a building that spreads across manicured grounds with the confidence of something that has never needed to announce itself. The gardens alone, running down toward the promenade, are an architectural argument for a certain kind of Swiss hospitality that remains unembarrassed by scale. Guests of historical consequence who have signed the register include enough figures from the 1919 Treaty of Lausanne negotiations to give the building an additional layer of political biography. At rates above $700 per night, this is deliberate, unhurried travel — the hotel functions as a destination within the destination. The Royal Savoy, a short walk along the lakefront, offers a different proposition. The original building dates to 1909 and was restored and comprehensively reimagined when it reopened in 2017 under Marriott's luxury collection, with interiors designed to bridge the Edwardian envelope with contemporary Swiss restraint. The spa is among the most serious in the region, and the overall register — lighter in ceremony than the Beau Rivage, more attuned to a guest who wants access to the city's cultural life at the EPFL Rolex Learning Center or the Collection de l'Art Brut — sits comfortably at the upper end of the Splurge tier. Together these two properties make Ouchy a more coherent place to base oneself than the city center, giving you the lake as a constant orientation and the steep, layered city above as something you visit rather than endure.

Book with PB and get cash back

Royal Savoy Hotel & Spa

Lausanne, Switzerland • Ouchy • SPLURGE

avg. $356 / night

Includes $19 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

LHW Leaders Club property

Royal Savoy Hotel & Spa Design Editorial

Edwardian grandeur and contemporary Swiss precision exist in careful tension along Lausanne's lakeside promenade at Ouchy, where the Royal Savoy Hotel & Spa has stood in various states of ambition since 1906. The original Belle Époque pile — its steeply pitched mansard roofline, corner turrets, and elaborate stone balustrades still intact and warmly illuminated against the evening sky — was comprehensively restored and extended in 2015 by the Lausanne-based practice Pont 12 Architectes, who added a low-slung contemporary wing that wraps the garden frontage without competing with the historic facade above. The 196-room property now carries both registers simultaneously: the patrician confidence of its century-old shell and the cool precision of interiors conceived by the Paris studio Jouin Manku. Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku resolved the interior scheme in a palette of dark wenge, smoke-grey leather, and silvered wallcovering — the channel-tufted headboards rising as architectural elements rather than mere furniture, damask bedcovers in charcoal and taupe drawing a thread back to the building's original period character without reproducing it. The spa, set within the new wing, deploys mosaic-clad columns and flush-lit ceilings beside a lap pool finished in deep cobalt tile. Most arresting is the rooftop restaurant, its steel-and-glass pavilion structure framing an unobstructed panorama across Lake Geneva toward the Savoy Alps — a view that makes the property's name feel less like heritage branding and more like a precise geographical statement.

Book with PB and get cash back

Beau-Rivage Palace, Lausanne

Lausanne, Switzerland • Ouchy • OVER THE TOP

avg. $701 / night

Includes $37 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

LHW Leaders Club property

Beau-Rivage Palace, Lausanne Design Editorial

Few addresses in Swiss hospitality carry the accumulated weight of Lausanne's lakefront the way this one does. The Beau Rivage Palace was assembled across two construction phases — the Beau Rivage wing dating to 1861, the Palace wing completed in 1908 — and the white Belle Époque facade visible from the images, with its mansard pavilions, iron balustrades, and colonnaded terrace giving onto the park, remains one of the most convincing grand hotel elevations in Europe. Set within four hectares of manicured grounds in the Ouchy district, the 169-room property looks south across Lac Léman toward the Savoy Alps, a prospect that has drawn everyone from Coco Chanel to the signatories of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne to its drawing rooms. The interiors navigate the persistent challenge of the palace hotel: how to feel domestic rather than ceremonial at this scale. The guest rooms divide broadly into two registers — one warmer and more classical, with Murano glass chandeliers, toile-de-Jouy wallcoverings, marble fireplaces, and carpet in dove grey and champagne; the other fresher, with celadon panelling, emerald velvet armchairs, and Louis XVI-style writing desks suggesting a Parisian apartment rather than a hotel room. The restaurant, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling, brass chandeliers, and generous floor-to-ceiling glazing framing the garden, carries the relaxed confidence of a room that has never needed to announce itself. The outdoor pool terrace, stone-paved and edged with clipped hedging, keeps the Alps in uninterrupted view.