Striving for Wellness Excellence Amid Global Change

We are entering a defining era for wellness one shaped not only by global change, but by a profound shift in how people value their health, time, and quality of life. Wellness is no longer an amenity; it is becoming the foundation of modern living.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen our industry evolve from offering moments of escape to creating pathways for longevity, resilience, and transformation. Today’s guest is more informed and intentional, seeking experiences that are personalized, preventative, and deeply meaningful. This challenges us to think beyond the traditional boundaries of spa and reimagine wellness as an integrated lifestyle.

The future of wellness will be shaped by both innovation and humanity. While advancements like AI and touchless technology are redefining possibilities, it is the power of human connection, intuition, and care that will continue to differentiate truly exceptional experiences.

At the same time, sustainability and social responsibility are no longer optional they are integral to how we build trust and relevance.

I believe the next chapter of wellness will be led by those who are bold enough to innovate, yet grounded enough to lead with purpose creating experiences that not only elevate wellbeing, but redefine it.

It was inevitable that every hotel brand would figure out that wellness can be a huge revenue stream that also complements GRR. Hence, the biggest challenge is maintaining or growing "saliency" of a brand's wellness programs.

For those who haven't studied psychology, salience is the word to describe what's top of mind, neurologically speaking, or actively being focused on by the brain's electrical networks.

What happens when every other hotel brand enters the wellness space is that there's so many options for the traveler to choose from that it's harder to stand out. With each new spa, fitness or nutrition program launch, it's harder for guests to say to themselves, "Yes! I want to go here time and again, paying a premium for that specific experience."

You developed a yoga program at your resort to entice solo travelers and retreats? So what; it's been done. You built some cold plunges to round a contract therapy circuit? So what; everywhere else already has ice baths.

Competition breeds commodification, which reduces salience, then likelihood to return (occupancy), then ADR growth and gross ancillary.

The solution? Bold, creative ideas built within meaningful guest journeys. Think different, as one very successful man once said...

The number one challenge is that wellness behavior has evolved faster than spa operating models—and as a result, the spa is no longer the primary gateway to wellness; it is one of many.

Consumers are engaging in wellness more frequently through fitness, recovery, longevity clinics, and local access models, but much of that engagement is happening outside the hotel spa. Wellness has become integrated into daily life, while many spas remain structured around infrequent, high-cost, treatment-driven experiences.

This creates a disconnect. Pricing has increased, but consistency and differentiation have not always kept pace, putting pressure on perceived value. At the same time, strong revenue growth may mask a deeper issue: it often reflects higher pricing rather than increased utilization or repeat engagement.

For operators, this raises a question of asset relevance. The challenge is not demand—it is alignment. This is not just an operational issue—it is a design, positioning, and business model challenge.

The number one challenge today is the gap between expectation and execution. Wellness is now positioned as a core pillar of the hospitality offering, yet in many cases it is still operated as a secondary function without the required expertise, integration or operational discipline. Guests are increasingly seeking personalised, outcome-driven experiences, but delivering this requires more than a spa menu. It demands clinical insight, data, skilled practitioners and a seamless integration across the entire guest journey. At the same time, rising operational costs and talent shortages make it difficult to maintain consistency and quality at scale. The opportunity is significant, but success will depend on moving from concept-led wellness to truly integrated, evidence-based and operationally robust models.

It's a hyper competitive market now as every brand has a wellness story to tell. And often, even if the experience is unique, the language makes it all sound similar. One challenge is to really craft the storytelling and world-building around your brand so that travelers understand your unique value proposition. This is not only true in their discovery process before they book (via AI searches or traditional google searches) but also on-property. I wonder if there are more interesting ways we can create a "recommendation engine" on property that is more experiential than simply looking through a list of treatments on a menu.

The number one challenge in spa and wellness today is not staffing, costs, or technology.

It is that we have built systems optimized for efficiency and revenue capture, then asked our teams to deliver deeply personal, emotionally intelligent experiences inside them. Those systems shape behavior long before a guest arrives.

You see it everywhere. Teams compensating. Workarounds becoming culture. The experience quietly breaking, even when every standard is technically met. This is not a hospitality problem. It plays out identically in financial services, healthcare, and retail. Anywhere humans are asked to deliver warmth inside infrastructure built for throughput.

Customer expectations are accelerating faster than organizations' ability to respond with consistency and personalization. The gap is not effort. It is architecture.

Most organizations are not under-delivering on personalization. They are precisely delivering what their systems are designed to produce.

The guest feels the system before they feel the service.

Layering more services or technology onto a structure that was never built for connection in the first place is not the answer. Closing that gap requires redesigning the experience from the human moment outward.

The biggest challenge I see today isn’t within spa operations alone, it’s the pressure placed on spa and wellness teams to carry the full responsibility of delivering wellness, while guest expectations have expanded far beyond that single touchpoint.

In today’s environment, wellness is no longer confined to the spa, it’s part of how guests eat, sleep, move, and experience a property as a whole. Yet operationally, many hotels still treat it as a siloed function. That creates both strain on teams and a missed opportunity to truly meet evolving guest expectations.

What I’ve seen through my work in wellness standards is that the real shift, and solution, is integration. When wellness is embedded across every guest touchpoint, it becomes a shared responsibility across departments, from F&B to housekeeping to design, marketing and programming. This not only alleviates pressure on spa operations, but also creates a more cohesive, elevated, and authentic guest experience.

Ultimately, the challenge isn’t just managing wellness, it’s redefining it as a property-wide strategy. And that requires education, alignment, and empowering every team member to understand their role in delivering wellness in a meaningful and consistent way.

The key is to make informed decisions. Wellness may be an amenity or turns to be the core DNA. Neither is wrong and both can deliver the inteded results. What does not when the hotel overpromises and considers wellness as a product. Hotel managers and owners need to understand that wellness has become a product consumers want to buy. And hotels hope to sell it to them. By glorified gyms, fitness centers or spas. By reworded spa menus. By some fancy (and expensive) equipment, e.g. cryochambers. And wellness has almost been taken over by the new buzzword, i.e. longevity.

Hotels should consider quick-wins, e.g.:

- Everything a hotel offers has an impact on guests' wellness state. Orchestrate the offers with that in mind and look for small wins, making most guests' stay well. Room amenities, scents, dry-bars for GenZ guests, healthy options in minibar in lifestyle hotels, or brain-food during refreshing breaks in conference hotel.

- Look at cultural differences and amend menus, offers accordingly. For example Latin Americans tend represent the so-called Multi-Active Cultures. For them hotels should arrange wellness offers that can be enjoyed in a group.

Learn from specialists who understand the whole wellbeing landscape and amend offers accordingly.

The number one challenge in spa and wellness operations today is the gap between investment and activation — and the talent crisis sitting underneath it.

Hotels are spending more than ever on facilities, technology, and programming. And yet utilisation rates remain disappointingly low, ROI conversations remain uncomfortable, and guests leave without understanding what was available to them.

The problem is rarely the product. It's the absence of qualified people who can bring it to life.

The pipeline of senior wellness professionals — those with the clinical knowledge, the operational experience, and the storytelling ability to translate a thermal journey or a biometric screening into a personal guest experience — is not keeping pace with the speed of industry growth. We are opening more wellness destinations than we are producing the leaders capable of running them with depth and conviction.

We have built increasingly sophisticated environments and increasingly under-resourced the teams responsible for activating them. Until the industry invests as seriously in developing and retaining senior wellness talent as it does in designing the spaces they inhabit, the gap between what wellness promises and what guests actually experience will remain its most expensive open secret.

I feel one of the biggest issues we are facing as an industry is "integration"; from finance and valuations, to building and planning, to operations and team building. The old models, both financial and organizational, don't work well anymore. We need new systems, new priorities and to develop more resilient protocols that solve the challenges in front of us today, and the increasing diversity to come.

At the moment, wellness and longevity are being heavily optimized and energized. Meanwhile, global uncertainty plays an enormous role in the trajectory of Life, supply chains, travel, and well-being. The challenges we see are multifaceted. Creating new programs and models to address true system failures with wider market thinking can help empower wellness in leadership everywhere. This is valuable in ways we just haven't seen it yet.