Sonal Uberoi is a global wellness expert and founder of Spa Balance, a boutique consultancy working specifically with hotels to help them tap into the full potential of their wellness offerings. She has worked with major hotels across the world, enabling them to attract a more discerning guest, build a loyal and committed customer base, attract and retain quality talent and increase profitability, without breaking budget. She is also author of ‘The Wellness Asset’. Visit spa-balance.com for more information.

The long, hard months of lockdowns were tough on the hotel sector. As the industry recovers from the testing times the COVID-19 pandemic has brought, it is clear that there is a need to embrace wellness and include or increase this area in hotel offerings.

To put this in financial perspective, data from the Global Wellness Institute is clear: In 2018, wellness expenditures were more than half of all health expenditures, coming in at $4.3 trillion. Of the 10 markets analyzed, between 2015-2017, revenue growth leaders were the spa industry (9.8%), wellness tourism (6.5%) and wellness real estate (6.4%).

Let’s look at what is required to face up to the difficult issues in wellness and how to move through these and provide a wellness focus for your guests.

Don’t Try to Segregate Wellness

To help explain this, consider that we often see ‘wellness’ and ‘well-being’ mistakenly being used interchangeably. However, there is a subtle yet important difference we must get right. A simple way to view it is: wellness is the tool, well-being the goal.

So, wellness provides us with the tools that allow us to access different types of well-being goals, e.g. physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. These tools include therapies, alternative medicine, fitness activities, meditation and mindfulness, a balanced diet and a gamut of other services designed to enhance our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual well-being.

This means that wellness is no longer confined to a specific activity or a physical space, such as a spa, a studio or a gym. The definition of wellness is broad and involves anything that enhances overall well-being.

So, quite simply, when we incorporate wellness into our lifestyle, or into our product ecosystem as businesses providing wellness services, we provide the stepping-stones toward better well-being.

Have You Been Working With Misconceptions?

Facing up to the tough issues and making wellness your focus has to start with you as the business owner or leader. Once you have truly accepted that a wellness strategy is not just right for your business, but is something you can personally commit to, then you can work on creating the best offering and supporting your staff, so that your business will have a positive future.

Perhaps you, like many, had overlooked wellness and can now see the value — or should I say necessity — of incorporating it into your hotel’s offering. Or maybe, like many businesses I have worked with, your wellness offering hasn’t performed very well. You may have taken a wrong turn in your thinking, planning or implementation, perhaps due to lack of experience or challenging circumstances.

Or maybe you are at a point where you have considered what you really know about wellness and realized you have been working with certain misconceptions. These have hindered your success and put you at a crossroads with your wellness ideas.

Ignore Guests at Your Peril

As professionals of the industry, we waste too much time and energy worrying about how to define wellness and how we label our offerings and features. We fret over what treatment and services constitute wellness, when all along our guests really don’t care. They just want their well-being problems solved, irrespective of how we choose to define things. They won’t stop having a massage because one day, as an industry, we decide it is no longer ‘wellness.’ As soon as you accept that your guests aren’t bothered how you define wellness, you can start to focus on what really matters: the guest. Listen to your guests as they will tell you what they want.

Wellness Cannot be Treated as a Commodity

Particularly as we come out of the pandemic looking for additional revenue, it is easy to fall into the trap of searching for quick fixes. However, wellness cannot be put into this category, it is not a commodity. Putting wellness at the heart of your offering means growing it over time. It takes commitment, steady work and an outlook focused on the long-term both for growth and profits.

Given this, it will come as no surprise to learn that there is no magic wand you can wave to create and implement the perfect wellness strategy instantly. Making the decision to adopt wellness is the first step on a journey. You will need to develop your knowledge of the wellness business, take on the task and meet the challenges of developing the concept that will work for your hotel, all at the same time as running your core business, managing costs and motivating your staff.

Don’t Chase Trends

There are always new ideas, products and services popping up in the wellness industry. It is tempting to rush to adopt the latest trend, perhaps from fear of losing out to a competitor or missing a trick that will bring in some new customers while the fad lasts. But no single new trend will create a wellness ecosystem for your business. You need all the elements of your wellness offering to work in harmony. Yes, this includes treatments and facilities, but it is also about your individual members of staff, your services and your partners. All must fit together and work together seamlessly. Jumping on the latest trends is more likely to create disjunction and disharmony.

And remember that wellness is a rapidly growing industry, so you will need to be ready to review your strategy and innovate constantly to keep up with what your guests are looking for.

Respect Your Specialist Staff

Wellness, like medicine, is a diverse field with a broad range of specialities. Just as we don’t expect a general practitioner to be a specialist in every aspect of medicine, we can’t expect a personal trainer to know about beauty, or an energy healer to know about high-intensity interval training programs. You don’t expect your sushi chef to jump in and cook dishes in your Indian restaurant, so don’t expect your physiotherapist to perform pedicures.

The field of wellness has many different specialities, and you need to use the expert practitioners in the roles they have been trained for. If you ask your massage specialist to be able to help a guest with an unrelated beauty treatment, you are asking for trouble — the guests will soon notice the lack of expertise and the reduction in quality of advice, etc.

Don’t Fall for Vanity Metrics

Wellness done well will increase the value of your hotel and attract investors. It generates direct revenue through products and services, as well as indirect revenue through higher occupancy, average room rate, average spend and length of stay — the tangible aspects of your business. When done right, it also builds a stellar reputation for your hotel and fosters brand loyalty and trust with all stakeholders — the intangible aspects of your business.

As soon as you accept the tangible and intangible value of your wellness offering, you stop looking at the vanity metrics that may make you look good in the short term, but fail to identify what really matters for your future. Instead, you can focus on building your wellness asset and consolidating your asset ecosystem to increase its value and that of the entire hotel.

It is clear that people have become much more health-conscious, and that we recognize the importance of looking after ourselves, both mentally and physically. Consumers who want wellness and businesses across many industries are embracing the idea of wellness as they reshape their processes, philosophies and products for the evolved market. Hotels need to do the same. | AC&F |