Why Care About Wellness?

You may not think wellness is important for your hotel, but it's becoming an increasingly significant way for other brands to carve out a unique point of differentiation to drive demand, extend length of stay (LOS), and boost ancillaries as measured by total revenue per available room (TRevPAR). It behooves every hotelier to take at least a partial interest in what’s happening in the world of wellness as a means of evolving brand and growing revenues. You may even become a wellness junkie and adopt
some healthy new lifestyle changes in the process.

Your next thought may be that wellness rests with the spa and recreation team, not the CIO or IT. But as industrywide labor squeezes continue, spas will increasingly rely on various systems, platforms, and integrations for efficient merchandizing, payments, scheduling, and inventory. Spas of the future can’t succeed without IT's tireless work.

Wellness itself is far more than just spa services and group yoga classes. While those traditional offerings (massages, facials, etc.) may represent the bulk of current spa or wellness gross revenue, there’s a burgeoning niche of wellness technologies, focused on delivering restorative treatments without proportional increases to labor requirements. That means your hotel can achieve more throughput with the same square footage.

There’s also the grander notion of your property’s overall offerings. Wellness can be an experience unto itself. Visiting a spa or medical tourism now count as specific reasons for selecting a property.

You can also look to add wellness elements to activities, gatherings, conferences or in-room stays, augmenting what’s already there to enrich the overall guest experience. Efficiently programming these enhancements requires various technological upgrades. Hence, a wellness-driven brand strategy must involve a visionary CIO or CTO who can seamlessly mold wellness components into the guest journey as part of the greater commercial strategy.

What we see emerging from the introduction of welltech and other wellness products into the hospitality industry is the ability to target health restoration and rejuvenation pathways through a variety of methods. This is what we mean by multimodal– the sum is greater than the parts as far as outcomes for guests and total revenue generated per guest.

Multimodal Wellness Experience Example

Multimodal wellness can be a win-win for the guest and for a hotel’s topline. Let’s look at skincare and antiaging treatments to reduce wrinkles and bestow a more youthful look. Some may say this is vanity, but your skin is your armor against the harsh environment around you – radiation, chemicals, pathogens, temperature changes, wind. There’s also a sizeable amount of evidence showing the link between skin age and overall health.

Traditional spa services for skin rejuvenation and repair would involve face and body treatments using a combination of essential oils and massage to release tension and trapped toxins and herbal teas with medicinal properties in a calming spa environment. Although already technically multimodal, we might add a photobiomodulation session before or after, This uses various light wavelengths in the red and infrared (IR) spectrum to stimulate collagen synthesis in the skin’s deeper layers.

Infrared heat takes us into contrast therapy territory – using hot and cold immersion to boost metabolism and recycle defunct cell parts. This category of thermal spas and hydrotherapy can include classic Finnish saunas, steam rooms, and IR saunas along with cold plunges, ice baths, and cryochambers.

Say you have a guest coming in for skincare. Instead of only getting a facial or massage, they end up purchasing an entire half-day itinerary of hot-cold, red light therapy and perhaps some other add-ons such as pulsed electromagnetic frequencies (PEMF) or vibroacoustics. They might even purchase a supplemental treatment. Collagen, which represents 30% of the human body’s total protein, is a great treatment service to start with. However, it can get complex once you get into products like neuroprotectors, adaptogens, nootropics, sirtuin activators, autophagy activators, senolytics, and a host of other growing supplement classifications.

And that’s all for just skincare! Imagine guests seeking other outcomes like improved sleep while traveling, enhanced cognition or mood during a stressful business trip, or a dedicated wellness retreat focused on clean eating, fat loss, and reconnecting with the earth. Wherever there’s a desire to improve health, there’s a way to combine various components of physics, chemistry, biology, kinesiology, and psychology for a multimodal approach to wellness productization.

The question then is a matter of prompting the purchase. How are you telling your guests about these experiences? At what stage of the guest journey are you designing these itineraries and upselling? Do you have easy online payment rails?

Welltech Leaders Worldwide

The integration of traditional wellness with new age welltech is already happening, primarily in the luxury hotel category. As with most innovations in hospitality, though, it’s inevitable for this trend to seep into the upscale then the midscale in various ways as demand increases and guests of all segments and psychographics start to prioritize a “health is wealth” lifestyle.

These examples show this subcategory’s potential:

Canyon Ranch: Offers an exhaustive range of fitness, introspective, and creative activities as part of its daily schedule, along with advanced screenings like bone density and blood flow ultrasounds to guide personalized treatments or training. No short description can really do justice to the full extent of services offered.

Carillion Miami Wellness Resort: Its finely crafted menu of wellness circuits presents the quintessential example of multimodal experiences. Guests select a desired outcome such as better sleep, muscle recovery, or destressing. Each circuit bundles 4-6 touchless treatments to achieve their goal.

Chenot Palace: A Swiss bulwark since the 1970s, its latest line of signature programs combines medical consultations, diagnostics, integrated treatments, and personalized nutrition with lots of fun welltech, such as hypoxic exercise training, electrostimulation, and neuroacoustics, over a one-week stay.

Clinique La Prairie: This Swiss brand has partnered with Sam Nazarian and Tony Robbins to help launch their preventative medicine hotel brand The Estate. Itineraries include patented nutritional menus, their own line of supplements, and tons of integrated therapies. ”

Equinox Hotel New York: In addition to a high-end gym with indoor and outdoor pools, rooms at this fitness brand’s premier hotel are specially configured for sleep quality. The spa offers functional acupuncture and lymphatic drainage massages, along with hi-tech light and plasma touchless therapies.

Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea: This Hawaiian flagship property has collaborated with Next|Health to offer IV drip therapies as well as more advanced stem cell and exosome treatments.

SHA Wellness Clinic: This Spanish longevity resort brand has just launched its second location in Cancun. Its integrated method offers a comprehensive manifest of biorhythm tests, tailored meals (plus prescribed beverages in between meals), and advanced treatments ranging from osteopathy to ozone therapy.

SIRO: Launched in Dubai, this fitness-focused brand from Kerzner International is set to open its second location in Montenegro this summer. In-room touchpoints such as zero-gravity recovery chairs and boxing setups are fused with sports-themed group classes in the gym and a la carte welltech like percussive therapy in the spa.

Six Senses Ibiza: An ultraluxury wellness list wouldn’t be complete without mention of this brand. The focus here is on RoseBar longevity programs that blend functional diagnostics with biohacking therapies and alternative or Eastern therapies like energy medicine, breathwork, and meditation.

Automation Is Essential: The overarching theme behind all these luxury brands is that there’s an extremely strong present and future lifestyle cohort with people valuing preventative medicine above other discretionary spend categories. Within that great mindset shift, people of all generations are increasingly seeking hotels and health clinics that can provide the services and exceptional experiences to stave off the symptoms of chronic disease or provide antiaging treatments. This includes both wellness primary, in which people travel specifically for health reasons as well as wellness secondary, in which guests want to stay healthy while traveling for other reasons.

Underpinning all these multimodal itineraries and experience sequencing are the systems that can automatically connect available time slots and inventory with customer requests. Right now, that’s handled by bundling objects within a given platform –such as the property management system (PMS), internet booking engines (IBE), guest messaging, activity management software or otherwise – to sell the overall itinerary package.

On-premise scheduling often falls to the individual practitioner, who must interpret the itinerary rubric into a minute-by-minute progression. The challenge here is that this still represents a lot of manual work to build out each guest’s exact order of events. IT professionals will guide the process of automating these itineraries while still allowing for flexible customization to fit with guest requests. Much of this will inevitably be done via artificial intelligence (AI)-driven conversational intake forms. But for now, consider that each new piece of welltech amounts to an armada of guest data that can be streamed into a warehouse (with the utmost compliance considerations, of course). This will enable personalizing future recommendations to repeat visitors to improve upon past outcomes and develop similar audiences to create new and recurrent revenues.

This is a category to watch and study, both to see what new welltech is on the horizon as well as how all that data gets transformed into multimodal experiences to accelerate a guest's wellbeing over their stay.