Destination Wellness Hotels: Real Estate with a Mission
Wellness amenities at full-service hotels, along with standalone destination wellness hotels (DWHs), are always evolving. Wellness amenities and hotels both come in a variety of sizes, configurations, and service levels. Historically, DWHs have been independently developed and operated as the vision of an owner who wanted to provide an environment in support of a specific lifestyle or wellness practice. The growing awareness of lifestyle choices makes hotel guests increasingly savvy consumers, and as a result, mainstream hotel companies are aggressively courting them with goods and services targeted toward their sensibilities.Hyatt Corporation purchased Miraval Resorts, a destination luxury wellness brand, for approximately $215 million in January 2017. As Hyatt Corporation President and CEO Mark Hoplamazian believes, wellness is a “very significant megatrend” and “not a fad.” [1] This transaction indicates the growing popularity of this area of the lodging industry even six years ago. “And [wellness] is more and more on the minds of C-suite executives thinking about productivity and effectiveness in meetings and in life,” Hoplamazian continued. “So what we ID’d with the Miraval opportunity was an opportunity to accelerate how we care for those customers and guests. […] And we can do that in a very different way than how hotel companies have approached it in the past.”