By incorporating wellness into various operations, hotel brands can both grow revenues per guest by introducing wellness-oriented add-ons to a hotel stay and, more defensively, prevent brand attrition as the increasing number of wellness-minded travelers "vote with their wallets" for properties that fit with their newfound lifestyles.

That said, there are two fundamental, magnetic-core-level obstacles that companies without any prior exposure to wellness face:

• Shopper’s Paralysis: Beyond just spa, wellness is often used as a catch-all term, bringing together healthy eating, sleep hygiene, mindfulness, yoga, breathwork, nature therapy, physiotherapy, the latest hype around extreme temperature exposure and a slew of others. Where should any given brand start? How do they know their current guests will appreciate these new amenities? How do executives justify big spending upfront that may only have a long-term payout if things go according to plan? This paradox of choice can prevent the development of a solid plan even before it gets soft approval.
  
• There’s No Silver Bullet: Will wellness be the saving grace for your hotel? Will it immediately become a vertical with topline revenues on par with the rooms ledger? Just as the results from a healthy diet aren’t immediately perceptible and compound over time, the financial benefits from wellness programming are likewise attained over the long run. Thus, any entrance into this space requires patience, planning and a full-fledged commitment so that there’s time to refine the offerings and build awareness.

Wellness is also an arms race. If the competition debuts a new sleep program that allows them to charge more and win over your customers, you risk commoditization.

To stay ahead, a mentality shift is needed at the owner, investor and finance level, with a full pivot within the brand DNA.

The strategy will look different for each hotel depending on the brand, target customers, hotel category, property location, property size, available CapEx and a myriad of other factors. And then you have the biggest variable of all, which is time. Say you develop a long-term vision for what wellness looks like for your brand five years from now. How do you get started? What are the early steps that will generate buzz and some form of measurable returns so that everyone at the top can foresee a worthwhile payout in the future?

A remote, forested resort in British Columbia with just over 50 rooms made its bread off of middle-aged couples and nuclear families driving up for two-night or three-night stays, along with a smattering of groups and small weddings during summer. The signature restaurant was the same attraction, achieving well-above-break-even results even though it wasn’t a big draw for nearby residents — as a fine-dining locale, it was priced out for regulars and seen as a special occasion place.

Pandemic restrictions on international travel and subsequent rate yielding helped the resort realize its best topline performance ever for 2021, but the sagacious owner knew the party would soon be over. We proposed using wellness and outdoor activities as a way to both give guests a clear, marketable reason to visit, or revisit, and drive ancillary spending.

At its current size, the financials didn’t support the buildout of full-service spa facilities. Luckily, from a previous remodeling, there was a lower-level fitness room populated with a few machines and dumbbells that was carved out of three former guestrooms.

With limited budget and a dearth of preexisting cultural buy-in, the roadmap we developed was all about "less is more."

We initially looked into offering strong incentives to have guests visit a nearby yoga studio, such as packages, shuttles, discount vouchers and promo codes. Besides costs, the main obstacle was that this wouldn’t be frictionless for guests at the resort. Classes had to be on-site and available on-demand.

Thus, the solution involved the following:

• Low-cost transformation of fitness room into an on-site studio by removing equipment.
  
• Scheduling software for both third-party practitioners and for guest to book their spots.
  
• To start, the hybrid yoga and meditation classes were only made available during peak leisure periods of Friday afternoon through Sunday late morning.
  
• Updates to the resort's entire digital marketing presence so that guest awareness was high.
  
• Instead of only purchasing yoga mats and making them available in the studio, these were conspicuously placed in a corner of each room as a strong on-premises nudge.
  
• Team retraining primarily involved personally introducing the marketing team to the practitioners coming on-site — so selling would be done from experience — and instructing the front-desk agents to inform guests about class availability, costs and booking.

The property was blessed with verdant land and already had a few trails carved out on the premises, in addition to several fantastic provincial parks within a short drive. The problem was that they were just trails and guests often didn’t know they existed.

The simple solutions involved:

• Decorative signage for the on-premises trails.
  
• An illustrated hiking map both in print at the front desk and on the website.
  
• Purchase of a handful of mountain bikes available as a zero-cost rental item.
  
• More digital marketing updates and team retraining.

Measurable results included yoga class bookings and bike rentals, as well as the number of inquiries — made digitally during the pre-arrival stages as well as verbally on-site — and comments in online guest reviews.

While we would like to say that it was an immediate success, the results were best described as consistently moderate. That is, only about a third of all leisure guests expressed any form of interest — significantly lower for other segments — in the classes or the trails, with a 5% conversion rate for class bookings from the total customer pool.

However, most remarkable was that satisfaction scores among the guests who self-declared that they used the studio or the trails were significantly higher. We have already noted a greater likelihood of these wellness-activated guests returning in greater frequency to the property.

The owners became believers. Extensions were drawn up including more classes, guided outdoor experiences, a redesign of the minibar to include healthy food and beverages and the setup of a small locally sourced, wellness-oriented gift boutique at the front desk.

For you, the conclusion should be that you can indeed achieve reasonable returns in the near-term. It doesn’t have to be a loss — often called "wellness for the sake of wellness" — if you start small by working within the physical boundaries of your hotel as well as the mental boundaries through which your current customers are approaching your brand.

Larry and Adam Mogelonsky are partners at Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice.

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