There are 3600 hotel rooms available in the city of Lucerne and over 530 Airbnb rooms, this is a growing trend which is worrying the local government, as they feel that the rooms rented on Airbnb are negatively influencing the hotels. Although there are as yet no concrete numbers as to the revenue this generates (and therefore potential loss to hotels) the local council is looking to the national parliament for directives on how to deal with this problem. It could be that Airbnb days in Switzerland are numbered…
Nicknamed the Breaking Bad of Oberägeri, a Norwegian investment banker has been in jail since May awaiting his trial after a crystal-meth lab was found in his apartment. The man claims that he was only producing the drugs as an experiment for himself, chemistry being his hobby, and that he had no plans to sell them to anyone.
Switzerland is part of the Dublin convention regarding asylum seekers, which means that they can send an asylum seeker back to their first country of entry in Europe and vice-versa, for years now this trend has mainly gone in the way that Switzerland was sending people back to other countries (mainly to France and Germany), however in the last couple of months this trend has been reversed with more asylum seekers being sent back to Switzerland from other countries, mainly Germany. This is because Germany is more efficient in its asylum seekers review process. In October Switzerland had to accept 300 asylum seekers back on their territory for processing and sent 330 back to other countries. It is of note though that after the 2015 spike numbers have gone back to around 1500 asylum seekers nationwide a month which is the historical average since 2003.
