We enjoyed two fantastic days of touring with Julian. He picked us up from our Viking River cruise promptly, and kept us entertained with many stops, picture opportunities, a delicious lunch of raclette, and lots of information about the area. After he dropped us off at our hotel in Lucerne, he still provided suggestions for our meals and activities for the days we were on our own. He then picked us up for our second day of touring, and again provided a wonderful day of exploring and a fun picnic lunch where he also brought us homemade baked goods that he prepared himself. Delicious!
Julian was professional, engaging and very accommodating to our needs. I would highly recommend using this company and Julian for any touring needs in Switzerland.
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From Newsroom to the Hidden Heart of Switzerland
Philippe Stalder grew up in the foothills of the Swiss Alps, in a place where the landscape shapes how you think before you have words for it. His family’s roots run further still, back to the Aletsch Glacier region, Switzerland’s most expansive ice field. That connection is not incidental to who he is as a guide. It comes through in how he talks about the mountains, and in where he takes people. Ask Philippe where his favourite place in Switzerland is and the answer comes without hesitation. The Aletsch. It always has been.
Journalism came next. Philippe earned a BA in Zurich before completing a Master’s degree across universities in Aarhus and Amsterdam, an education that placed him inside two of Europe’s most distinct media cultures and sharpened his instinct for what a story actually needs. Back in Switzerland, he worked as an editor at Vice, the Tages-Anzeiger, and SRF, developing a reputation for precise communication, rigorous thinking, and a genuine interest in the stories other people overlook.
That same instinct has always pointed him toward places and subjects that don’t announce themselves. It is what makes him a natural at what he does now.
For Philippe, Switzerland is not a postcard. It is a place with layers, and most people only ever see the first one.
The Aletsch is where it starts for him, always. The largest glacier in the Alps, moving imperceptibly, carrying the weight of something much older than tourism or travel. When your family comes from a place like that, you don’t just visit it. You feel the difference between knowing a landscape and simply standing in it.
What he loves most about Switzerland is that it keeps revealing itself. The more you know, the more there is to find. The geology. The political history. The local traditions that exist in one valley and nowhere else. The restaurants that don’t have websites. The views that don’t have names. That is the Switzerland he shows people, and the reason he never runs out of things to say about it.
The Birth of Luxury Tours Switzerland
Some of the best ideas start with a wrong turn.
The project that captured that instinct most completely was a documentary Philippe wrote, directed, and produced independently. “Reclaiming Cocoa” examines the hidden human cost behind Swiss chocolate production. It takes something familiar, something Swiss, and reveals the complexity beneath the surface. The film screened in ten countries across three continents. For Philippe, it was proof that if you care enough about a subject to find the real version of it, people anywhere in the world will want to understand it too.
Alongside that work, he developed and hosted SRF’s impact investigative format, bringing long-form accountability journalism to national broadcast audiences. The skills that work required, curiosity, patience, and the ability to make complicated things genuinely interesting to someone encountering them for the first time, are the same ones that define his guiding today.
In 2015, Philippe set off along the Silk Road. He came back with a different understanding of what travel is actually for, and what a guide gives someone who is far from home.
Over the years that followed, he spent extended periods living between cultures across five continents, developing the cross-cultural fluency that now makes him equally at ease with guests arriving from New York, Tokyo, or Dubai. He has also survived motobiking through the Himalayas. That tells you something about how he approaches an unfamiliar route.
Guiding, Philippe realised, was not a departure from journalism. It was the same craft, applied differently. Both are about revealing what is actually there, beneath the surface, to someone who could not see it without help. With Luxury Tours Switzerland, he works exclusively. The stories he tells, the routes he builds, and the access he has earned through years of genuine curiosity about this country are not available anywhere else.
He guides guests who want Switzerland explained as well as shown. The ones who want to leave knowing not just where they went, but why it matters.
Awards and Recognitions
- Documentary Filmmaker – “Reclaiming Cocoa”, screened in 10 countries across 3 continents (reclaimingcocoa.ch)
- Developer and Host – “impact investigative” format, SRF (Swiss Radio and Television)
- Master of Arts in Journalism – Aarhus University and University of Amsterdam
- Editor – Vice Switzerland, Tages-Anzeiger, SRF
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