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.”
INTELITY®, provider of hospitality’s leading guest experience and staff management platform, has announced a partnership and live integration with FreshBed, the world’s first bed featuring its own full control climate capabilities. An ideal solution for hotels and wellness resorts, this relationship unlocks the ultimate luxury offering by providing guests with the ability to adjust their complete sleep environment directly from a bedside smart room tablet or mobile app powered by the INTELITY platform. Thanks to this partnership, the perfect night’s sleep is just a screen tap away.
Celebrated on June 10, Global Wellness Day highlights the importance of being healthy and living well. As wellness increasingly becomes a priority and daily lifestyle objective for more and more clients, we continue to strengthen our leading offerings in this strategic sector. Our platform spa.accor.com, recently launched in Europe, takes this one step further, enhancing the ALL - Accor Live Limitless digital experience with an online booking platform offering clients a wide range of wellness offers and services. The platform also drives business growth for our hotels, generating exciting opportunities and providing higher visibility for their wellness experiences.
Wellness and health tourism stands ready to offer significant benefits for destinations worldwide – but will need coordination, investments and a skilled workforce to fully deliver on its potential. That was the key takeaway message as leaders from the public and private sectors met for the UNWTO Conference on Education and Skills in Medical and Wellbeing Tourism in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The Spas at Mandarin Oriental harness the transformative energy of music with a new Wellness Music Programme. Set to debut on Global Wellness Day (10 June 2023) across the Group, the Wellness Music Programme has been carefully curated drawing on regional cultures and philosophy with healing traditions in their music.
Proximity to public transport, clients, cafes and restaurants are typical selling points for office owners trying to draw new tenants. But increasingly they are seeking to provide another quality: social value.
As a pioneer in destination wellness spa resorts for nearly 30 years, Miraval Resorts & Spas brings its core intention of empowering people to lead their best lives to the podcast space with today’s launch of Miraval Life in Balance. The first podcast from the Miraval brand aims to guide audiences to cultivate wellness, intention and inspiration from anywhere in the world. Host Lauren Scruggs Kennedy, an American lifestyle and clean-living blogger, takes listeners on a virtual journey of insight and mindfulness to Miraval Resorts & Spas, where thought leaders, brand collaborators, and guests share their personal expertise on wellbeing practices and how they foster mindfulness in their everyday lives.
With Memorial Day fast approaching, Americans are starting to think about their much-needed summer vacations, and hotels are gearing up for what could be a very busy travel season. But more guests means greater interaction between people and surfaces, which can elevate the risk of germs spreading throughout the hotel.
In this episode we speak with Tammy Pahel, Chief Wellness Officer at Alchemy Resorts about the growing impact of wellness on travel, how to use wellness to personalize experiences in the ways travelers want, and how leaders can use wellness strategies to improve the staff experience.
With demand for spa services outpacing resources available to deliver them, it is increasingly vital for spa operators to optimize how they align staff and service reservations to optimize revenue and profit per time booked.
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.