Wellness is a huge growth area for hotels. In hospitality, we can define this as products, services, amenities and other features that deliver guest wellbeing. Concurrently, longevity is the concept that humans can live longer while also living healthier within those new years afforded to them.
Biologically speaking, however, the activities that are the most effective are often not those that maximize the moment-to-moment feeling of comfort, harmony or calm. Humans are designed to adapt and get stronger from temporary stressors. We sacrifice short-term pleasure for a greater long-term reward.
A popular example of this is contrast therapy – ice baths followed by hot saunas. Few of us actually enjoy the time spent under the ice, and yet we power through for a minute or more because it has proven health benefits. Cold plunges have now gained acceptance worldwide and are now an area where wellness and longevity overlap. Other activities that we’ll cover below fall in the camp of being beneficial for longevity, but they're still often viewed by the public as just too far outside the average person's comfort zone.
This is precisely where hotels can focus their efforts for big revenue boosts and brand differentiation. By offering a dynamic, supportive environment for people to persevere through the brief discomfort, hotels can expose guests to new longevity-based experiences, helping expand the boundaries of their individual comfort zones and potentially inducing a transformative lifestyle change for the better.
Let’s start with exercise. To quote Dr. Peter Attia, author of Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, “exercise is the most powerful longevity drug; it not only adds years to your life but improves your healthspan, reversing both physical and cognitive decline.” Simply put, there is no substitute for the benefits of regular physical fitness.
But what type of exercise is best? There are distinct benefits to weightlifting versus cardio machines versus mobility-driven activities like yoga or calisthenics. How does a novice decide? How does someone exercise if they have a chronic injury? What if a person is only motivated by a group environment? These are all areas where hotels can help.
At the ultraluxury end, you have Canyon Ranch with its multi-night packages that come with a litany of available outdoor activities combined with nutrient-dense meals as well as an assortment of physiotherapy and preventive health screenings. Then there are wellness retreat centers like Bodyholiday in Saint Lucia, where groups of guests engage as a community in fun, purposeful programs centered around specific health goals like weight loss or exercise confidence.
For an urban, upscale setting where guests are mostly ‘wellness secondary’ – traveling for another purpose but wanting to stay healthy while on the road – look to properties like EAST Miami, which has organized a run club in addition to having a fitness center complete with an expansive movement studio and a full schedule of mobility or high intensity interval training (HIIT) classes. The Andaz Mexico City Condesa offers animal flow classes that are frequented by an equal split of travelers and locals, helping bring the two groups together into one community. Finally, at the more elite fitness level, new brands like SIRO are emerging for fitness geeks to be amongst likeminded peers.
The core takeaway here is that ideas abound for how to evolve your fitness offerings in order to motivate people to stay active, no matter their skill set and mindset around working out solo or within a community.
Besides exercise, another enormous area where longevity may conflict with wellness is in diet, nutrition and eating habits. Namely, let’s discuss intermittent fasting, or jump-starting some healing processes at the cellular level once the body has been free of food for 12 hours or more.
The practice of intermittent fasting is growing in popularity, but how can a hotel or resort environment support this, when abundance is the general trend? Opportunities exist here for both destination wellness as well as wellness-secondary hotels to aid guests within flexible fasting programs.
For wellness-primary travelers, we see resorts now offering supervised programs for safe, prolonged fasting regimens. We say ‘safe’ because besides the mental endurance of experiencing hunger all the time, fasting can release lots of heavy metals back into the blood from their sequestration within fat cells, necessitating a ramp-up period or the use of chelating foods.
The gold standard for this category is Lanserhof. Currently with three locations in Germany and Austria, this longstanding brand is based on the healing power of nutritious foods and mindful eating. Over seven days, guests are guided through a fasting program by professional doctors where calories are minimized at the start and guests are also asked to chew each bite 30 times in order to restore the mind-body connection. Each luxury health clinic also features onsite agriculture to eat as nutrient-dense, organic produce as possible, alongside a full array of tech-enhanced wellness treatments and personalized medical consultations.
Hardly the only player in the prolonged fasting game, there’s also Buchinger Wilheimi with two locations in Lake Constance in Germany, and Marbella, Spain. Chenot Palace, with locations in Switzerland (at an ADR of over $1,000) and Azerbaijan, leans more into the medi-spa category with personalized nutrition programming complemented by advanced diagnostics and welltech treatments. Third, upscale brand TheLifeCo offers multi-night water detox and green juice detox programs at its locations in Antalya, Bodrum and Phuket.
To support intermittent fasting lifestyles, we’re also seeing many hotel restaurants gradually adapt with more flexible hours in order to appease travelers who may want an early dinner to fit in some protein before their eating window closes. And besides only when you eat, there’s of course the matter of what you eat. Hotels all over the world are engineering menus with ever-healthier plates, centered around the core concept that highly nutrient-dense, natural, whole foods and ingredient diversity (eat the rainbow, as they say) results in longer-lasting satiety which suppresses cravings while fewer calories are needed overall.
Therein are but three areas to explore: exercise, fasting and contrast therapy. The same can also be said for sleep, mindset, breathwork, sports, supplementation and a host of other areas where we are discovering ways to optimize longevity, which may be at odds with some thoughts around what qualifies as wellness. Whichever path you choose to go down, know that examples of success exist and also that guests are yearning for these sorts of hotel features.
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.
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