![]() ![]() The McDonald’s restaurant just off the lobby was open 24 hours (a rarity in Switzerland). ![]() ![]() The Zurich Golden Arch hotel opened first, and it was unlike any other hotel around. They were the brainchild of Urs Hammer, chairman of McDonald’s Switzerland, who was responding to the parent company’s push for diversification and new ideas. Relatively few travelers ever stayed in-or heard of-the hotels, which opened within a few weeks of each other in the spring of 2001, one near the Zurich airport, the other in Lully near the A-1 interstate. But as I tell my MBA students and executive-education participants, the foray can be thought of as an inexpensive “real option” that provided the innovation-hungry company with an opportunity to learn valuable lessons from a controlled failure. The Golden Arch venture in Switzerland ended in 2003 after two and a half years, when the pair of McDonald’s hotels closed. In the end, the decision by McDonald’s to build a couple of four-star European hotels, with arch-shaped headboards for the beds and fast-food restaurants on-site, wasn’t as bizarre as it seemed. ![]()
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