Beau-Rivage Palace
Lausanne, Switzerland · 5-star Hotel Leaders Club (LHW) Price swings 215%
Beau-Rivage Palace in photographs
Click any of them to see it full size.
When to go
The cheapest month we have found is December, at around USD 642 a night - -3% against what this hotel usually asks.
Where to book
- Book on Booking.com - Free cancellation options, guest reviews and a familiar checkout.
- Book direct with the hotel - Usually the best price, and the only route where a loyalty discount applies.
- Hotel website - Photos, facilities and location.
The loyalty angle
This hotel sits under Leaders Club (LHW). We have seen the member discount on the hotel's own booking page. Every price on this page is the public rate, so a member may pay less than the figures shown.
Our notes
Opened on 25 March 1861, the Beau-Rivage was ahead of its time from the very start - the first hotel in Switzerland to light its suites by gas rather than oil lamp. The building guests see today, in its Art Nouveau and neo-Baroque dress, was largely rebuilt in 1908; it has stayed in the hands of the same family, the Sandoz, since 1872, four generations running the same address on the Ouchy lakefront.
Perhaps because it sits quietly on a lake between two republics, the hotel has spent much of the last century hosting people trying to end wars rather than start them. The Treaty of Lausanne was signed here on 24 July 1923, closing out the conflict between the Allied powers and the new Turkish Republic and drawing borders Turkey still holds today; the Reparations Conference on German war debt met here in 1932; and, far more recently, foreign ministers from six world powers and Iran spent weeks negotiating the 2015 nuclear framework in its function rooms, followed the next year by an emergency summit on Syria between John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov. In between the diplomacy, Switzerland's first radio broadcast went out from the hotel in 1922.
Guests staying for less consequential reasons have included Victor Hugo, Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward; Coco Chanel, who came to stay after her divorce and by several accounts never entirely broke the habit; Charlie and Oona Chaplin, who lived a few miles up the lake in Vevey and treated the Beau-Rivage as their local; and, in the decades since, Mary Pickford, Gary Cooper, Nelson Mandela, Rod Stewart and Tina Turner. The gardens where a young King Hussein of Jordan celebrated his eighteenth birthday in 1953 are the same ones in the photographs below - a hotel that has simply kept working, for over a hundred and sixty years, while history kept happening around it.
The area
Lausanne sits on the northern shore of Lake Geneva (Lac Léman), the largest lake in western Europe, which Switzerland shares with France. The city climbs from the lakefront at Ouchy up to the Gothic cathedral on the ridge, so almost every street ends in a view of the water and, on a clear day, the Savoy Alps across it. The cathedral was consecrated in 1275, and a night watchman still calls the hours from its tower in the small hours. Down at Ouchy, the promenade, the old lakeside hotels and the Olympic Museum make an easy morning: Lausanne has been the home of the International Olympic Committee since 1915 and calls itself the Olympic Capital.
The region is the reason to stay a few nights rather than one. East along the shore, the Lavaux vineyard terraces, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2007, run for about thirty kilometres toward Vevey and Montreux, with walking paths between the villages and wine cellars open to visitors. Vevey, Montreux and the Château de Chillon follow along the same line, each a short train ride away. Across the lake, the CGN steamers cross to Evian in France in about half an hour, and the same boats stop at lakeside towns on both shores.
Geneva lies at the western end of the lake, roughly forty minutes from Lausanne by direct train. It brings the Jet d'Eau, a fountain that throws water around 140 metres into the air, a compact old town on the hill above the water, the Palais des Nations and CERN. That makes Lausanne a quiet, hillside base that reaches both the vineyards and Geneva without a car, and with the Alps close enough for a day on the snow in winter.
In the blog
Lausanne: four palace hotels, and the one that undercuts them all
Lake Geneva's grandest hotels sit within two kilometres of each other, and the cheapest of them runs at a third of the dearest. All four share one free rewards club that we have measured cutting up to 10.7% off the public rate.
2026-09-23 · Lausanne, Switzerland
What it costs through the year
| Cheapest we have seen | USD 566 ≈ €506 |
|---|---|
| What it usually costs | USD 662 ≈ €592 |
| Dearest we have seen | USD 1,987 ≈ €1,776 |
| Times we looked | 71 |
| Gap between the two | 215% |
| Last checked | 2026-10-29 |
