Earlier this month, Hilton released its highly anticipated third-annual travel trends report, providing valuable insights into the future of travel. Based on a global survey of over 10,000 travelers, video diaries with 60 U.S. travelers, and interviews with Hilton travel insiders, this report unveils the key trends that will reshape the travel industry beyond 2024.
Is fitness a primary booking driver for hotels? Unless it’s a lifestyle brand specifically known for its exercise programming like Equinox or EVEN, the answer is a resolute ‘no’. We can confidently say that a traveler’s purpose will most likely always center around location first, with price as a close-second attribute, for all those outside the luxury segment. However, there are a few significant trends that hoteliers should consider with respect to fitness that will influence how guests choose their properties and the rates they can command.
In an ideal world, every guest who books a room would spend at all the facilities onsite – restaurant, spa, golf, gift boutique, you name it. But that is very often not the case no matter how adept hoteliers are at marketing these ancillary spend opportunities. The only touchpoint that reaches all guests is the in-room experience and this is largely affected by how good a night’s rest each guest has.
It’s said that the average person spends a third of their life in bed, so wouldn’t it make sense to optimize this time by getting the best sleep experience possible?
You are what you eat. Every day, more people are coming to appreciate food as more than just fuel but as medicine that can restore the body, slim the waist, steady the mood, elevate cognition, and even reverse chronic diseases. This burgeoning wellness way of life is also reflected in various dietary trends like plant-based or keto as well as buzzy meal additives like probiotics, superfoods, nootropics or adaptogens.
We believe in the importance of sleep. If a guest doesn’t get a good night’s rest they are less inclined to return. That profound statement came courtesy of Simon Chapman, Complex General Manager for The Benjamin Royal Sonesta, who oversees the hotel’s Rest & Renew Sleep Program] in collaboration withDr. Rebecca Robbins, a medicine professor specializing in sleep science and author of “Sleep for Success” (2011).
As resorts strive to cater to guest demands, they find that wellness is top of mind for many guests in 2023.
Mental health issues have become a pressing concern for health systems worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated this situation, leading to a staggering 25% rise in depression and anxiety rates in the first year of the pandemic period.
The Hospitality industry strives to provide excellent customer service, luxurious accommodations and exquisite cuisine. However one of the most essential aspects that is often overlooked is health and wellness, for both guests and employees. In recent years, the industry has started to recognize the importance of promoting health and wellness as an enhancement of the overall guest experience, as well as to improve employee satisfaction and productivity, which leads to better staff retention. This is a great step in the right direction, but there is still much to do.
While the world continues to experience global and economic unknowns, planning may feel challenging for the years ahead.
Wellness has tremendous potential for hotels, as is being made abundantly clear from the litany of articles on the matter in recent months. Part of that potential stems from the all-embracing, or rather ambiguous, definition of the word. It’s healthy eating; it’s spa; it’s fitness; it’s mindfulness; it’s sleep; it’s nature; it’s medical diagnostics; it’s all of the above. But one theme throughout for hotels is that the focus skews to the individual or one-on-one (mostly leisure transients), less so to group activations.
The sudden growth in demand for wellness pursuits has perhaps calmed with the recession of Covid-19, but general interest in the great outdoors and getting back to nature has remained strong, prompting more and more hoteliers to tap into this trend.
How do we design spaces so people can have an experience, ie feel something, perhaps awaken in some small way, or reflect on their lives or the world around them?
The problem with slow burn trends like the current aging out of the baby boomers is not so much that we fail to predict them but that we often cannot account for them in a readily quantifiable and obviously actionable manner on a quarterly or annual financial statement to thereby jumpstart the necessary adjustments to adapt a business.
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.”
If you don’t make time for your wellness, then you will be forced to make time for your illness. This catchy phrase underpins the widespread growth of the myriad practices falling within the broad, and quite ambiguous, banner that is wellness.
The uncertainty and instability of the past several years have increased the level of stress in employees. In correlation to this, the health and wellness tourism market is growing. Indeed, the Global Wellness Institute expects that wellness tourism expenditures will likely hit $1.3 trillion by 2025.
In this ongoing column on the growth of wellness as a profit center for hotels, one concurrent trends to be cognizant of is the aging of the baby boomer generation – ostensibly the wealthiest to date that is, at present, entering the prime travel years of early retirement. This generational shift intersects with the longevity revolution in many interesting ways that hotels can capitalize upon.
The benefits of a medical services located within a resort or hotel property are well founded. With an aging society and with travel and tourism set to increase post COVID-19, partnering with an onsite medical clinic franchise could strongly benefit a hotel. Now, a new medical App promoted by lodging properties, allows a domestic or international traveler with preexisting medical conditions, or with young children traveling to have increased confidence and ease of mind when traveling.
The wellness industry is diverse, dynamic – and, therefore, complex.