All too often, something new emerges in our industry, and we treat it as something we should all be doing, or aspire to offer, or position as the next great thing. And it isn’t always necessary. Or appropriate. Or honest.
So, let’s talk about wellness. What it is. What it isn’t. And what it’s becoming in hospitality—for better and for worse.
I grew up with two doctors for parents. I grew up with Jane Fonda, the Hawaiian landscapes behind Gilad and his sister, stepping, spinning, body pump, P90x, yoga, pilates. I’ve done a 10-day Vipassana silent retreat. I’ve researched and written about medical tourism for twenty years. And when the mood is right, I will absolutely book a 4-hand massage (if you’ve never had one, stop what you’re doing and fix that).
But here’s what I’ve learned from all of it: the massage is a treat. The retreat is a reset. Neither will make me healthy. Only you can do that through unglamorous, uninstagrammable, boring daily habits.
That distinction—between a treat, a reset, and genuine wellness— is one the hospitality industry has almost entirely lost. And it matters, because brands are starting to put serious capital behind the confusion.
What Happened to the Spa?
Not long ago, a spa was a spa. A place to be pampered, to exhale, to have someone take care of you for an hour or a day. It’s a legitimate and wonderful thing that might be short-lived but can have a lingering effect if the experience is memorable.
A real wellness retreat isn’t just about pampering. It’s about building awareness —experiencing, even briefly, a way of living you might not sustain when you go home, but that stays with you in a way that a massage never quite does. The 10-day Vipassana I attended didn’t make me a different person, but it showed me something about my own mind that I haven’t forgotten: that I could be without my phone and computer for 10 entire days. That I could sleep for 10 hours. That I could eat a healthy vegetarian diet that was neither boring nor leaving me hungry. The meditation was a bonus. That’s the promise of genuine wellness: not transformation, but reflection. Not a shortcut, but a mirror.
But genuine wellness is hard to sell. It asks something of the guest. It doesn’t photograph well. And it rarely justifies a premium rate. So, the industry found a shortcut that fed on people’s sense of insufficiency. Biohacking.
The ‘Confession Booth’ Problem
Not all biohacking is created equally. Cold plunges, red light therapy, cryotherapy—these sit in a gray zone between pampering and performance. The science behind some of them is reasonable, the risks are minimal, and nobody is going home worse off for having tried them. They’re enhanced spa treatments dressed up in the language of optimization. Harmless enough—but let’s not call them wellness.
The real confession booth is what comes next.
IV therapy is where most properties start—it’s the easiest treatment to add to a menu because it requires almost no infrastructure. Bring in a nurse, set up a drip, and suddenly you have a “wellness offering.” For a few hundred dollars, a guest can have an infusion delivered straight to their veins, designed to boost energy, reduce inflammation or flood their body with vitamins it may or may not need in as few as 30 minutes. And it’s easy to see the appeal. It’s fast. It’s painless. If you can afford to come back, you can keep the cycle going. No lifestyle changes required.
But that’s precisely the problem. The confession booth model goes something like this: live however you want, eat whatever you want, sleep as little as you can get away with, run on fumes — and then check into a property that will “fix it” in as little as 30 minutes. And it gets more serious from there. Stem cell therapy will extract and then reinject your own cells back into your body to slow aging, in some cases not even your own cells, but those from umbilical cords or placental tissue, marketed as “young blood therapy.” You may leave feeling like you’ve done the work—without having done any of it. That’s not wellness. That’s an expensive offset.
Where Does It Belong?
Equinox Hotels is arguably the only mainstream hospitality brand that has genuinely earned the brand permission to offer this kind of programming—because their entire identity is built around high-performance living. Members live and breathe physical wellness by putting in hard work. For everyone else, the honest question is whether this kind of programming belongs to your brand at all. We’ve sat across the table from some of the world’s most respected wellness brands and asked exactly that question. Sometimes the answer is no—and the most valuable thing an advisor can do is say so before the capital is committed.
The Broken Body Problem
There’s a second, quieter concern—and one with real mental health implications. The entire language of optimization lifespan, longevity, biomarkers, repair, DNA, performance—all of it implicitly tells guests, employees, and the public that our bodies, in their natural state, are a problem to be solved; that, without intervention, we are declining. That’s a profoundly anxious message to deliver in a space that is supposed to make people feel whole, and for guests already vulnerable to anxiety, body image issues or the relentless pressure to perform, it can do real harm. An environment designed to heal should not make guests feel broken. Like we’re in Gattaca.
It connects directly to the broader culture around weight loss interventions that aren’t medically necessary, driven not by health need but by body image anxiety that the wellness industry has partly created and is now profiting from. When a treatment implicitly says your body needs fixing, and that fix is available for a price, it isn’t wellness. It’s a product built on insecurity. It’s buying bottled water when you’re in the Alps.
And for those who can’t afford it —the $10,000 longevity retreat, the $200 IV drip, the quarterly stem cell protocol—the message is equally clear: your health has a price tag. Wellness has always had an aspirational dimension. But there’s a meaningful difference between aspiring to feel better and being made to feel that health is a luxury product available only to those who can afford to optimize.
The Investment Question
For owners and investors, there’s a harder conversation underneath all of this. The properties best positioned to deliver this kind of programming are the ones that have built their entire concept around it, with the infrastructure, the clinical expertise, and the brand permission to operate at that level. For everyone else, the math is worth examining very carefully before the capital is committed.
The Conversation Worth Having
Wellness is one of the most important things hospitality can offer—and one of the most easily corrupted by the pressure to monetize it. The industry is at a fork on the road: one path leads to genuinely restorative, responsibly designed experiences that create real value for guests and sustainable returns for investors; the other leads to expensive programming that overpromises, underdelivers and in some cases makes guests feel worse about themselves than when they arrived. What side of this do you want to be on?
So, here’s my question: when you look at your property’s wellness offering—or the one you’re planning to build—are you genuinely creating conditions for people to be well? Or are you building a very beautiful confession booth?
Yvette Jong is the founder and principal of Craft House Consulting, a fully integrated hospitality advisory firm.