Wellness had a watershed moment at the beginning of 2023 and now here we are in 2024 with most every hotelier recognizing its importance in the overall profitability mix, especially for resorts and the luxury or premium categories.

With this, we ask: What’s your company’s guest wellness strategy? How are you going to operationalize it all?

To start, there’s a bit of shopper’s paralysis within the broad banner of wellness because the term is a bit of a catch-all for literally any service or product that can improve well-being. Having too much choice can often be a bad way for a brand to decide on which direction to take.

Just think of all the possibilities, not limited to the following:

• Health-conscious cuisine, herbal teas and anti-aging supplements.
• Traditional spa treatments such as massages, facials or acupuncture.
• On-demand, in-room fitness or stretching programming.
• Guestroom sleep programs with circadian lighting and smart beds or pillows.
• Yoga, meditation or breathwork classes and other forms of group mindfulness.
• Guided intermittent fasting regimens and water or juice detoxing.
• Contrast therapy with saunas, hot tubs, ice baths, cryotubes or hyperbaric chambers.
• Forest bathing, self-guided hikes and all manner of exploring the great outdoors.
• Light and sound therapy involving near-infrared exposure or sensory deprivation tanks.
• Cacao ceremonies and using borderline-legal psychedelics such as psilocybin or ayahuasca.
• Physiotherapy and other one-on-one functional restoration sessions.
• Educational experiences including culinary or aromatherapy classes.
• Genome analysis with one-on-one nutritional and chronotype advice.
• On-site counseling for blood work, epigenetic testing or microbiome analysis.

For any of these, the question remains: Who will oversee and deliver these services, given the labor challenges currently prevalent in the hospitality industry?

Hotel executives face the dilemma of expanding wellness offerings while grappling with the existing challenges of room cleaning and staff management. Plus, delivering wellness services required specialized practitioners that now are in higher demand. This means shorter supply and greater compensation or other incentives.

Despite this ever-present obstacle, failing to innovate in the wellness space not only means missing out on a lucrative vertical but could also compromise a hotel's future brand positioning. In a phrase, remember "commoditized nightly rates" because when there is no compelling reason for guests to choose one property over another then the market price dictates all.

The solution to the wellness labor dilemma is, of course, technology to help ramp up the process engine by automating the mundane tasks that we all can’t seem to get away from. Besides the wage-level automations such as a better booking engine or conversational AI to replace a voice channel IVR, this automation primarily aims to free up managers to focus on planning, implementation and continuous improvement of wellness programs, emphasizing effective time management for resource redeployment.

It's critical here to improve the "data plumping" by establishing rich system integrations to organize guest data across profit centers. At first brush, this means better service delivery by knowing who the guest is. This centralization then enables profound insights into existing customers, facilitating accurate predictions for new, productive offerings that enhance loyalty, ancillary spend and awareness.

With tech as the salve, here are four ideas for how technology can play a crucial role in developing a profitable wellness arm for your hotel brand.

Consolidating siloed guest data is crucial for future services and amenities. This integration, whether within the property management system or central reservation system or through a CRM or BI platform, enables detailed insights into guest segments, their on-site spending patterns and preferences. For instance, linking restaurant point of sale and PMS provides valuable information on dining choices, guiding menu expansions.

Despite core booking drivers such as location and nightly rates, guests may be inclined to purchase additional services. Utilize well-configured pre-arrival emails and guest communication platforms to deliver upselling messages in preferred mediums. Testing within these systems allows refinement of approaches based on conversion funnel data.

Automation of practitioner hours and intelligent tools for this dynamic availability streamline the offering of treatments or classes according to when the most popular time slots are. This ensures efficient inventory management and informed decisions about when guests are most receptive to such services. Consider reserving only high-margin massages on busy weekend afternoons versus allowing just any other treatment.

Guests seek inspiration from hotels for personal transformation. Tech-centric solutions, such as in-room exercise programming or wellness apps, can be incorporated into nightly rates or sold separately to drive ADR growth.

By leveraging technology in these areas, hotels can not only meet wellness demands but also enhance their overall guest experience and financial success. While that opening list may present a lot of opportunities for expansion, the first step is to start with what you have and optimize its merchandizing before adding costs. That’s the most likely to lead to greatest chance of success.

Adam and Larry Mogelonsky are partners of Hotel Mogel Consulting Ltd., a Toronto-based consulting practice. Larry focuses on asset management, sales and operations while Adam specializes in hotel technology and marketing.

The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.

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