Ten longevity trends and their hotel applications for 2026

With the perfunctory New Year’s resolutions soon approaching, everyone is looking to starting fresh in 2026. For the hotel world, the appropriate adage is: “As one does at home, one will soon from their chosen travel accommodations.”

This phrase implies a lot. At its core, it entails continued growth for wellness, both for the domicile in the form of at-home equipment or packaged goods, for and the premium that prospective hotel guests are willing to pay for access to great wellness amenities or that they spend in ancillaries.

With every new trend in the broader wellness space, there are opportunities for hotels to capitalize on these trends in order to obtain heightened brand equity, ADR growth or boosted total revenues. To keep things neat and listicle-ized, here are ten to consider:

Suppose there’s a jar of cookies on the table. Your conscious brain knows they are unhealthy, but your unconscious base drive still thinks it’s the year 20,000 BC and that you’re living in perpetual starvation. Hence, it takes a lot of willpower to resist those cookies, and more often than not, you’ll lose. Instead, a systems-based approach would apply the principle: out of sight, out of mind. Rather than constantly battle your lizard brain to resist the cookies, move the jar to the back of pantry.

Hotel application: Replace systems with habits, structure, routines or models. Travelers have so much to think about logistically and emotionally that hotels can excel by doing more of the health-driven planning on their behalf so that they can take the need for discipline out of the equation. This can be in developing personal itineraries like what they do at the five-star resort level or ensuring that guests have blatantly obvious access to healthy dining options.

Every study to date is basically proving and reproving the same thing: Sleep is the foundation for good health. Without it, you suffer from a myriad of lower energy, cognitive impairment, unhealthy eating drive, fat rigidity or others. While scientists are still teasing out the exact mechanics of sleep and sleep disorders, hotels in 2026 still have a lot of good data to act upon.

Hotel application: Sleep amenities in the room are big business. And every bit counts in the design, from the ultraluxury hotels that have perfectly soundproofed rooms to the three-star properties that put earplugs on the bedside table. There are sleep-centric hotels, upgraded room categories, wellness welcome amenities and sleep brand standards.

Many hotels talk a big game about functional fitness and movement as a core wellness pillar, yet how many of these hoteliers have a background in exercise science? Not to besmirch our fellow hotel executives, but the real cutting edge of wellness comes from understanding that the human body needs a full range of motion before it can properly develop strength, lest you suffer an acute or repetitive strain injury. Mobility is the apt term, combining balance, flexibility and agility.

Hotel application: Think of your fitness program as a way to inspire your guests to move more like a human back at home. Fitness is rapidly evolving away from the machines that constrict force to one direction. Instead, hotels need to program around three-dimensional exercises: dynamic warmups, isometrics, yoga, calisthenics, free weights, animal flow, martial arts, dance, stretching, sports training and so on.

Take this phrase to heart. So often, people in their 30s, 40s and 50s think they can ‘burn off’ that pizza like they did in their early 20s by exercising a bit more the following day. Sadly, human metabolism doesn’t work that way. You need to eat clean every single day.

Hotel application: We’re already seeing this trend in action with guests asking where their ingredients are sourced, demanding more organic foods, looking for fewer fried foods or avoiding ultra-processed garbage. It’s only going to keep increasing as time goes on. Evolve your menus and your sourcing or suffer.

There’s now solid evidence supporting the health benefits of daily direct sun exposure. Besides how it converts bodily cholesterol into vitamin D — therein working to lower levels of the plaque-forming LDL — getting sun on the skin promotes increased cognition, better mood and improved sleep.

Hotel application: For new builds, designing for natural light is a must. For existing properties, look at how you can open things up. Even if people aren’t consciously vocalizing that the sun heightened their mood, there will be a halo effect back onto customer satisfaction scores.

When it comes to the studied centenarian clusters known as the Blue Zones, many people focus on the diet, namely the Mediterranean diet through the additions of olive oil, greens, nuts, fish, seeds and generally eating close to the earth. But what’s often given only an asterisk is the manner by which these nutrient-dense foods are consumed. People living in Blue Zones eat together as families, friend groups and communities on a regular basis, in the process lowering stress and amplifying the sense of connected joy.

Hotel application: The hotel brands that are developing strong loyalty, engagement, advocacy, revenue per guest and return visits are those that treat their spaces as ones where connections are formed and communities are built. There are many ways to go about this, from creating a lively restaurant scene to properly programming group classes. To give you a flavor of what’s possible with a peak example, consider BodyHoliday in Saint Lucia, where guests not only meet and form friendships at the resort, but they then plan to return at the same time in subsequent years while also hosting meet-up dinners in their respective cities. It’s no wonder BodyHoliday now sits at an average length of stay above 7 nights, has a four-digit ADR and has many guests who have been coming each year for over two or three decades.

Most scientific studies in the 20th century were conducted solely on men. As such, their data is profoundly biased and often wrong given the vast differences in physiology between the two biological sexes. Researchers around the globe are now working diligently to reconcile this oversight in order to give clearer guidelines to women on all things wellness including nutrition, sleep, exercise routines, fasting, supplement use, cold plunges, hormone replacement therapy and others.

Hotel application: Multi-night women’s retreats are big business for resorts already, giving a safe space for people to connect, discuss their experiences and grow together. But these are still quite niche compared to the total addressable market and the overall lack of proper education on this subject matter. Indeed, there’s a larger movement around ‘female body literacy’ whereby hotels can connect knowledgeable instructors with female guests in a group setting or one-on-one coaching.

You may already know this one explicitly or just feel it intrinsically. The algorithms underpinning what appears in your social media feed on platforms like Instagram or TikTok are designed to make you addicted by flooding your brains with dopamine in erratic, unnatural levels. Moreover, these algorithms often deliver polarizing content, warping one’s perception of the real world and making the viewer depressed. We all need a break!

Hotel application: The need for digital detoxing has never been more apparent. This can come through polite nudges to leave your phone in the room or having phone-free spaces. More advanced programming also exists such as silent retreats.

On the note of toxins and technologies, let’s turn to the broad trend of people drinking less. Alcohol is biochemically bad for the brain and it’s high in calories. But we’ve never stopped to think about why alcohol was invented in the first place, and then persisted in society long after its initial use case. As Edward Slingerland argues in “Drunk” (2021), alcohol has traditionally been a tool for slight inebriation in order to help people drop their guard a bit and form strong social bonds. He imagines alcohol not just as a beverage but as a technology for achieving higher states of creativity and cooperation, but with the strong caveat emptor that drinking should be done in the community, in moderation and in formats that our bodies have had millennia to adapt to (beer, wine and not spirits).

Hotel application: Yes, hotels still need to expand their non-alcoholic offerings with mocktails, zero-proof spirits, dealcoholized wines and others. But our prediction is that these emerging beverage categories will soon find an equilibrium amongst their alcoholic brethren. Instead, think more along the lines of ‘set and setting.’ It’s not so much about the poisonous alcohol in your glass as it is who you’re drinking with, the glassware itself, the kindness of the server or bartender and the overall atmosphere of the restaurant. All those aspects will forever be important to social creatures as we are.

We end on a heady, spiritual note. As the world edges deeper into an individualistic, technology-driven state, it’s all too easy to succumb to the pressures of prioritizing yourself over that of your family or your neighbors. What we know from longevity studies is that the healthiest people are those who strike a balance between personal goals and being active members of the community. Part of the unwritten mission statement of wellness is that of ‘oneness’: helping people achieve greater degrees of wellbeing and joy through experiences that let them realize the interconnectedness of all things in the universe.

Hotel application: In looking to design your wellness programming, don’t disregard the mindfulness and spiritual component, as it may be the most important of all. Hotels are fundamentally places of community across cultural boundaries where we can all connect and experience joy together. This takes a lot of work to design, but guests remember those properties that truly care and reward them kindly.

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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