Index
3.1
Booking temporary accommodation or a business apartment
3.2
Booking a pick-up service at the place of arrival
3.3
Online pre-ordering of groceries
A well prepared arrival will greatly influence the first impression of your new living and working environment. The mood upon arrival can be lifted by taking guided city tours or short excursions for example, particularly if family members are accompanying you.
MySwitzerland gives you a good overview of activities in Switzerland. Additionally, there are cantonal and municipal tourist offices. Simply enter your destination city and the term «Tourist Office» into Google and you will find locally tailored offers for guided city tours as well as other recommendations.
Business apartments are usually small and centrally located. As families like to use the summer or Christmas holidays for their move, the small number of family apartments are booked up early and quickly during these times. Ideally, you should start your enquiry with some preferred dates and, if possible, adjust these to match availabilities. The monthly rent for business apartments varies between CHF 2,500 and CHF 6,000 depending on size, standard and location.
You may use our list of contacts including providers of business apartments in the Greater Zurich in order to start your enquiry. If you send enquiries to these contacts in the form of a collective email, please enter these as a blind copy in the BCC field so that they remain invisible to all other addressees in the mailing list.
In Switzerland, the statutory notice period for furnished apartments is two weeks according to Art. 266e (OR [Swiss Law of Obligations]). The landlord may also grant a one-month notice period.
In order for a registration with the residents’ registration office to proceed smoothly, a permanent residence must be indicated. Therefore, when renting business apartments, it is important that the new address is deposited as the registration address.
Attention! Airbnb and other similar holiday solutions do not usually offer this option. Even if you live with friends as a subtenant, the landlord must confirm this in writing.
If you wish for a pick-up service upon your arrival, you must reserve this in advance, specifying the arrival details. The cost of such service ranges between CHF 80 and CHF 300 depending on the number of guests and the destination.
Based on experience, Coop has the best home delivery service for groceries, particularly with regard to online pre-ordering from abroad. This is because, with Coop, deliveries to the new Swiss residential address can be ordered even with a foreign telephone number. In the case of Migros, however, orders are only possible with a Swiss telephone number. Delivery on the day of arrival must be specified sufficiently early with the first order.
Once your arrival has been prepared, your temporary accommodation has been booked and your first place of residence has thus been decided on, you can prepare to register with the municipality and open a bank account. Sort out these two matters as quickly as possible after you arrive. You can find more on this in the corresponding chapters.