WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

Mid January · Davos, Graubünden · Five Days · Since 1971 · Ideas

By invitation · Arranged for members who are asked

A panel session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in the Congress Centre, Davos — I · The Annual Meeting

Dates: 18 to 22 January 2027
WhereDavos
DressLounge suit
AdmissionBy invitation of the host
The weatherIn January Davos reaches about 0°C by day and minus 9°C at night, and rain or snow falls on about one day in four.
The tableThe Court dines afterwards at Restaurant Chesa, Seehof Davos, Promenade 159, Davos Dorf (seehofdavos.ch).
In companyA member who holds an invitation tells the Secretary, and the Court brings its members together where it can.RSVP tells the Secretary that a member means to attend. Send passes the engagement’s name, its date and the address of its page to whomever the reader chooses, or, on a computer, copies the address; the Court itself sends and keeps nothing.RSVP

The World Economic Forum meets for five days in the third week of January at Davos, a Swiss town of eleven thousand people at five thousand feet, a couple of hours by rail from Zurich, the last of it on a mountain line.

Some three thousand people are accredited to it. Several times that number come anyway.

Flags along the snowbound Promenade at Davos during the Forum week, at World Economic Forum — II · Flags in the Snow

The Badges

Nothing at Davos is understood without the badges, and Davos understands itself entirely through them.

A white badge admits a participant to the sessions in the Congress Centre. A white badge with a hologram admits its wearer to a private gathering of senior ministers held within the meeting, and is often mistaken for the mark of a head of state. Below those sit orange for press, blue for staff, and a further set of colours whose distinctions are known mainly to the people wearing them. There are at least ten, and the hierarchy is legible from across a room.

An individual cannot buy a white badge. A company must be invited into partnership by the Forum and then pays a great deal for the privilege of having been asked. Invitations are personal and not transferable.

Which makes the badge the most precise instrument of social sorting on this calendar. Ascot has four enclosures and publishes the rules for all of them. Davos has ten and publishes none.

The audience of a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos — III · The Session

The Promenade

The sessions run Monday to Friday inside the Congress Centre, and they are not where anything happens.

The main street of the town is taken over for the week. Shopfronts and restaurants become the pavilions of companies and countries, each with a programme and a guest list of its own. A person with no accreditation at all can spend the whole week on the Promenade and never once enter the official venue.

What matters most happens further off again: dinners in hotels, fireside sessions in private rooms, receptions nobody announces. That structure is why so many arrive without badges, and why some of them do better than the people who have them.

Three people walking along a snow-covered pavement past snowy trees and a glass-fronted casino building in Davos, the day before the Forum opened (2016) — IV · Fresh Snow

What to Know

Klaus Schwab, a professor at Geneva, convened the first meeting in 1971 for several hundred European executives. It was called the European Management Forum until 1987.

The town is small and the hotels are few. Rooms are taken a year ahead at prices that reflect it, and a good many people stay down the valley in Klosters and drive up.

It is January in the Alps. People arrive in city shoes and regret it by Tuesday.

The mistake is going for the sessions. They are recorded and published and can be watched from anywhere in the world. What cannot be had elsewhere is the Promenade and the rooms behind it.

Questions

When is Davos 2027?

The World Economic Forum holds its Annual Meeting at the Congress Centre in Davos each January. The 2027 Annual Meeting is held from 18 to 22 January 2027.

Can anyone go to Davos during the World Economic Forum?

The Annual Meeting is not open to the public; its participants attend at the World Economic Forum’s invitation. Davos expects some 3,000 of them, from business, government, international organisations, civil society, academia, media and the arts. The town itself stays open to visitors, although parts of it are closed off during the meeting.

What is Davos?

Davos is the Swiss town, at 1,560 metres, where the World Economic Forum, a not-for-profit foundation, holds its Annual Meeting. Leaders from business, politics, science and society gather in the Congress Centre to discuss trade, conflict, poverty and the environment, with participants from some 130 countries.

When did the World Economic Forum begin?

In 1971 Klaus Schwab, then a professor at the University of Geneva, invited 444 executives of Western European companies to the first European Management Symposium in Davos. He founded the European Management Forum as a non-profit foundation in Geneva, and in 1987 it took the name World Economic Forum.

Snow-covered roofs of Davos with the Congress Centre, the church spire and the wooded valley and mountains beyond, a few days before the Forum opened (2016) — V · Davos in January

The Court

The World Economic Forum is not the Court’s own, and it is the one engagement on this calendar that exists for business rather than for its own sake. The Court makes no pretence otherwise.

Accreditation is not something the Court can obtain. It is given by the Forum to organisations rather than to people. What the Court arranges is the week around it: the journey, rooms, and a table in a town where every table is taken. Members who go for the Promenade rather than the Congress Centre find that sufficient.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.