★ World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

01Warum es relevant ist

No other week puts this many heads of government, central bankers, chief executives and institutional investors inside one building. The Forum describes roughly 3,000 people from more than 110 countries, and the meeting's practical value has always been the density of unscheduled conversation rather than the panels, which are streamed free. In our reading, Davos matters less as a place where decisions are made than as the week in which the year's economic argument is set. It is also the most persistently criticised gathering on this calendar, and the criticism is part of what keeps it consequential.

02Die Woche darum

Davos in the third week of January stops being a ski resort. The Promenade is closed to ordinary traffic and fenced in sections, army units man checkpoints on the approach roads, and the Swiss authorities impose an airspace restriction over the valley. Hotel dining rooms, sports shops and bakeries are sublet as branded houses; the lifts keep running but their customers thin out. The Swiss press reports each year on shop rents reaching multiples of a normal month's takings. Almost all of the surrounding programme runs on separate invitation lists. The Forum has also long run an Open Forum of free public sessions, the one part of the week built for people without a badge.

03Anreisezeitpunkt

Participants arrive Sunday or early Monday and leave Thursday evening or Friday; the Congress Centre thins by Friday lunchtime. Road checks and rail crowding peak on Monday morning, and Tuesday and Wednesday are the fullest days on the Promenade.

04Unterkunft

Davos has two centres, Platz and Dorf, strung along one valley road; the Congress Centre and the secure zone sit in Platz, where the Forum contracts most of the hotels it designates. Landmarks along the Promenade such as the Belvedere and the Seehof fall inside the security perimeter and are unavailable to walk-in guests. The realistic alternatives are Klosters over the pass, Chur and Landquart down the valley, and the Prattigau villages on the rail line. Staying in town buys the Promenade at night; staying down the valley buys a normal rate and a long commute.

05Zugang und Hospitality

The Annual Meeting is not ticketed in any ordinary sense. Participation is by invitation, and the largest route in is corporate: partner companies receive delegate places against annual membership, tiered from member to Industry Partner to Strategic Partner, with an additional per-person admission fee. Published figures for those tiers are historic and none is quoted here as current. Public figures, academics, NGO representatives and accredited journalists attend without paying. Badges are colour-coded and hierarchical, from the white delegate badge down to hotel-only and accredited badges.

06Wo das gesellschaftliche Geschehen stattfindet

The Promenade is the week's public spine, and walking it end to end in the evening is the closest thing to an open programme. The Belvedere and Seehof terraces, the Schatzalp funicular, the Kirchner Museum and the restaurants around Davos Platz station absorb most of the traffic that is not behind a door. Klosters, twenty minutes away, is the overflow. The branded houses run daytime programming frequently open to anyone who registers online.

07Anreise

08Praktische Hinweise

09Geschichte

Klaus Schwab, then a business professor at the University of Geneva, convened the first meeting in January 1971 as the European Management Forum, a seminar on American management technique for European executives. The organisation took its present name in 1987, by which time the meeting had turned diplomatic: Greece and Turkey signed the Davos Declaration here in 1988, F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela met at the 1992 meeting, and a draft Israeli-Palestinian agreement was negotiated in 1994. The 2002 edition moved to New York after the September 11 attacks. Schwab stepped down as chair in April 2025.

10Wer ist dort

Heads of state and government and their ministers; central bankers and regulators; chief executives and boards of the Forum's member companies; institutional investors and private-capital principals; technology founders; heads of UN agencies and multilateral banks; academics, union leaders and NGO directors; and roughly 500 accredited journalists.