Congress City: Lugano, Switzerland
The 2008 Congress in Lugano was a success with close to 600 attendees, providing once again the opportunity for a center in the world of Alexander Technique teachers to meet and share their skills with each other.
We are happy to be returning to Lugano - for a number of reasons:
- The Congress Center is owned by the Tourist Board of Lugano so they are able to extend to us an excellent price for the rental of the Center. Also by returning to Lugano three times we are given a 20% discount.
- The University rooms are also very clean, elegant, and effective for our workshops. They also come at a price that we can afford. Each one comes with a full array of multi-media equipment at no extra charge. This can be a considerable cost in other venues.
- At the moment the Swiss tax structure has no VAT tax for educational endeavors. This exemption may be repealed in an upcoming Swiss vote, but even if it is the VAT tax rate will only go up 7.6%. The Oxford Congress in contrast was charged a 17.5% VAT tax rate.
- Lugano has easy connections to two major intercontinental airports: Zurich and Milan-Malpensa. Both Milan-Linate and Bergamo-Orio al Serio airports are serviced by low cost airlines within Europe. Milan-Malpensa has hourly bus connections direct to Lugano and there are hourly trains from Zurich which travel through spectacular countryside.
- Lugano sits at the northern end of beautiful Lake Lugano and is situated to take advantage of touring the beautiful hill towns and mountains of the Italian speaking canton of Ticino. All of the northern Italian lakes are are nearby, plus the historic towns of northern Italy and of course Venice.
- Lugano itself is a nice town. It is big enough to have plenty of hotels and small enough to have nice areas and cultural sites to tour. There are crowds and traffic in August, but that is true for most cities that are large enough to host a group of our size. If the modern city experience is too strong, one can in 45 minutes walk to a medieval town on Lake Lugano ( Gandria ) that has no cars. From the Congress Center a bus gets there in 15 minutes.
When we returned to Lugano in August 2009 to work on the Congress in 2011, we were all very pleased to be back. We discovered more to the city than we realized when we were working on the Congress in 2008. I hope you will join us in discovering more of Lugano’s assets when you return or come for the first time in 2011.
