The Lex Weber enshrined the warm bed. It never decided who steers it.

In Grimentz, this past December, a first development of sixteen chalets and forty-one apartments opened its doors with full hotel services. A second building site is rising in the heart of the same resort. A residence of fifty-seven units is already on the market, delivery announced for next year. In Zinal, in the same valley, a complex of the same kind has been running for several years now. There is nothing isolated about these cases: this product is multiplying across the Valais resorts, driven by Swiss and foreign investors who have, in the end, found within the constraint an investment more profitable than the one it forbade.

I have already written, in the book, that the Lex Weber deserved to be read less as a punishment imposed from outside than as a compass: by capping the pure second home at a fifth of a municipality's housing stock, it pushed land towards uses that keep a resort alive all year round rather than eleven months out of twelve. The warm bed — worked, maintained, occupied without interruption — is that answer. The cold bed, which sleeps for the greater part of the year while an absent owner pays its charges, is what the law was meant to replace. The market grasped this shift faster than most of the political debates that surrounded it, and it grasped it in its own way: by rushing into the very exception the law itself had provided for — organised accommodation, the residence with hotel services, which escapes the cap because it belongs to commercial operation rather than to housing.

What I had not yet set down is what happens once the building is delivered. A residence of fifty serviced apartments is not run like a chalet let for fifteen weeks a year by word of mouth. It calls for pricing that varies with the season, with the occupancy of the neighbouring resort, with the school calendars of three countries. It calls for a housekeeping effort synchronised with arrivals that are never alike from one week to the next, with turnovers that are sometimes daily across several dozen units. And it calls for a continuous presence, in several languages, alongside guests who book from platforms each of which imposes its own ranking rules and its own commissions.

This is the layer that artificial intelligence now comes to occupy, and it is here that the question changes in nature. The manager of a residence of this kind in Grimentz or Zinal does not, as a rule, buy software that he configures himself: he subscribes to a platform, generally conceived elsewhere, which thinks for him the price of the night, the ranking on the booking portals, sometimes even the replies to the comments left by guests. The algorithm does the work properly — often better than a craftsman's management would. It simply answers to no one in the valley, and no one in the valley can explain to it that a patronal-feast weekend or a road closure changes the terms of the game in any way other than through the figures it observes after the fact.

A resort that plays the actor, on this precise point, is not a resort that refuses these platforms on principle: it is a resort, or a grouping of residences, that owns or co-pilots the decision layer, knows which parameters the algorithm uses, can adjust it when a generic rule produces a locally absurd result, and above all trains on site the people capable of doing this work rather than subcontracting it entirely. A resort that plays the shop window is the reverse: the building is from the Valais, the façade is from the Valais, the housekeeping staff is local, but the pricing brain runs on servers no one will ever visit, configured by people who have never set foot in the valley.

Nothing, neither in the law nor in the investments that followed, guaranteed that this layer would remain steered from within the valley rather than leased to a third party that does not know it. This is the result of no conspiracy, merely of a sequence: we first settled who could build, then who could invest, never who would decide the daily operation. Tourism accounts for a little under fifteen per cent of cantonal output and close to a fifth of employment. A growing share of that weight now rests on buildings whose construction we held on to, without asking ourselves whether we were also holding on to the skill.

Attracting that capital, the canton has done, with a certain success, since the land is being built and sold. Holding on to the skill that operates it day to day is another matter, one that is not played out on the same ground and is not won with the same tools. And passing this skill on to tomorrow's managers assumes that we identify it as a trade in its own right, distinct from the hotel reception desk from which it inherits the name but not quite the substance — which is nowhere yet the case, so far as I know.

The Lex Weber settled the question of the square metre. It was never meant to settle that of the dashboard. That is another battle, a quieter one, and it is being fought now, in residences we visit on holiday without ever wondering who, exactly, holds the controls.