With the global wellness market expected to exceed $1.8 trillion in 2024, hotel developers must consider how to best court the health-inclined traveler. Hospitality promises delivery of satisfaction, contentment, rest and well-being to travelers, and today, there is both a renewed interest and investment in carrying these ideals forward through innovative design and clever application of hotel fundamentals.
Curating hotel experiences around wellness allows an asset to remain contemporary and competitive, regardless of geographic market. Consider the rise of bleisure travel, whereby business travelers extend their trips to enjoy the locations they are already visiting professionally. American Airlines recently revealed that bleisure travel generated nearly half of the airline’s $13.46 billion in revenue from 2022. Today’s average stay is roughly 3.8 nights, and bleisure travelers are helping push these figures higher by booking more nights following their meetings or conferences. Bleisure guests often spend more time in the guestroom between work and play, giving them ample time to experience everything the hotel has to offer.
Considering the impact of bleisure travel on hotels over the past decade, owners should take more steps to incorporate wellness directly into their property’s design and operations. The tenets behind wellness design are more than just functional — it may include access to greenery and desirable spaces for rest or reflection. Wellness may also come in the form of attention to audiovisual detail throughout a property, its color configuration and even its scents. By multiplying holistic wellness offerings in a “create-your-own-adventure” layout, operators can use bleisure travelers and other wellness-focused groups as case studies to create long-term positive brand associations with your property through purposeful design.
Purposeful Design
Wellness is more than a buzzword today. According to guests, hotel wellness activities contribute to as much as 38% of a hotel’s overall guest satisfaction score.
Bleisure travelers straddle the line between the two major hotel traveler segments — business and leisure — and accordingly, they utilize the majority of amenities a hotel has to offer. They see a hotel as both a workstation and an escape, and can tell when a designer is resigned to one world or the other. Their equal desires for work and play can help hotels isolate some of the most impactful elements for design overhauls.
For example, some designers have historically espoused a plan to remove the hotel desk from guestroom configurations, citing some travelers’ preference to work on the bed using a laptop or their smartphones. However, bleisure travelers require a surface for work and play, for laptops and dining. In many cases, their needs necessitate more than one configuration to find comfort. To tackle this challenge, certain brands, such as Sheraton, are offering an oversize work/play table that also adjusts to become a standing desk.
Even limited-service hotels can take simple steps to adopt purposeful design. Full blackout curtains and a great mattress go a very long way toward satisfying many guests’ wellness needs, and many guests would pay a premium to guarantee their presence on arrival.
After all, isn’t the basis of both hospitality and wellness to offer a restful night of sleep? Executing perfectly on simple, standard components like mattresses and blackout drapery is a foolproof way to increase guest satisfaction scores. To further evaluate other opportunities, operators should meet with their asset management and operations teams to gather feedback on their frequent guests, their needs and how to meet them. During renovations, these opportunities are, as ever, best tackled with a collaborative development team reflective of all major stakeholders (operations, asset management, development, owner, design, etc.).
Beyond Four Walls
Hoteliers should also think beyond the guestroom for opportunities to deliver wellness to guests.
Consider the potential to access nearby parks, streams or walking paths, and how your hotel’s exterior design can incorporate these places into its ethos. Hotels can leverage experiential design by working their proximity to parks, game preserves, trails and more directly into their property’s marketing strategy.
Experiential design comes naturally in some locations, such as the Bear Mountain Inn in Tomkins Cove, New York. The historic getaway along the Appalachian Trail provides a natural refuge from city living. This focus and societal investment in wellness has also driven the creation of newer brands, such as Trailborn, which marries an adjacency to natural parks with an elevated food-and-beverage offering, creating an atmosphere of nourishment, both externally and internally. This same logic has contributed to the ongoing popularity of brands like Outrigger, Under Canvas, and Autocamp.
When a natural park isn’t readily available, celebrating infrastructure within your city is an easy, free opportunity for operators to provide outdoor engagement to their guests. The New York City Highline is a hidden gem within the city that is often challenging for tourists to locate. This 1.45-mile-long elevated park is atop the former New York Central Railroad and draws travelers for the green respite it provides in New York’s concrete jungle. Hotels near the attraction have simply added it to their list of amenities by incorporating simple directions for guests. Guests can visit the Highline at their leisure, and the hotels benefit by simplifying the journey.
The rise of brands such as Outrigger, Trailborn, and more have proven travelers’ desire to experience something beyond the traditional hotel experience, beyond four walls and an omelet for breakfast. Messaging on the hotel TV, meditation programming for those on hiking trails or a fresh fruit table available in the guestroom each day could all be considered wellness design choices, and nearly all hotels can learn from or deliver these elements to guests.
Hotels are also drawing on wellness trends when choosing materials during development. Minimalism is driving this push in hotels across various scales and locations, from economy to luxury. Some luxury brands, such as 1 Hotels, have even found ways to deliver the necessities of hospitality at the highest possible level, all driven by a wellness design ethos supported by ethical sourcing of materials and a lack of unnecessary embellishments. These trends show that wellness is far more than a niche concept that fringe travelers and operators accept. Instead, it’s a movement helping establish new hospitality norms that benefit hotels and travelers equally.
Hotels can begin their wellness design journey by establishing a vision for their property and the guests they serve. Hoteliers are encouraged to bring their questions, perspectives and expectations to design and development partners and formulate a strategy that incorporates wellness into the hotel’s core aesthetic. With appropriate buy-in from hotel leadership and a realistic approach to budgeting and timelines, any hotel can incorporate the tenets of wellness directly into its hospitality vision.
Shannon Seay is a partner at H-CPM, a construction project management and owner representation consulting firm that specializes in managing hotel renovations, conversions, repositioning and new construction. She has overseen the renovation of hotel assets ranging from full-service luxury to select-service prototype, boutique to branded, nationwide. Some of her favorite renovations include The Rittenhouse Hotel, Voco Times Square, Renaissance Pittsburgh, Hyatt Regency Morristown, and the Hilton Santa Barbara Beachfront Resort.
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