tl;dr – Will there be a breakthrough?
Recently, Marriott’s announcement of its first luxury wellness brand got me thinking about wellness-first hospitality brands in general. Lots of hotel chains have dabbled into it the ‘wellness’ arena, and frankly, there’s not really a concrete definition as to what constitutes a wellness brand.
On the luxury end, you can look at brands like the Six Senses, with its Sex Senses Spa. You could make an argument for Aman. Maybe you’d even throw Minor Hotel’s Anantara into that bunch. Hyatt’s has Miraval. For a long while, Marriott marketed the Westin as a wellness brand. I feel like it kinda still tries to in certain locations. There’s the OG resort BodyHoliday. Obviously, all these brands are way different, and I guess that’s kind of the point – wellness means different things to different people.
Lately, there’s been a few new brands that are trying to build with wellness as a core. Here’s a look at them.
SIRO – SIRO is an immersive, luxury “fitness and recovery” from Kerzner International (owners of the One&Only). It is designed as an urban, sports-centric destination combining high-performance exercise, specialized recovery, and 5-star hospitality.
Equinox – Of overpriced gym fame, Equinox has recently transitioned into more of a lifestyle brand with a pipeline of hotels and resorts on the way.
TheLifeCo – These resorts focus on wellness, treatment, detox, and medical facilities.
With such a broad definition of ‘wellness’, it’ll be interesting to see if any of these brands – the new or the old – develop a following to be considered the ‘go-to’ wellness hotel.
