When it comes to wellness trends, it all boils down to what's old is new, says Pam Cruse, co-founder and chief marketing officer of holistic hotel brand SCP Hotels.
In fact, this year's wellness trends aren't really trends at all, she said on a recent interview alongside her husband, Ken, for the CoStar News Hotels podcast, and she gave the example of saunas and cold plunging, which Scandinavian and Finnish people have done for centuries.
It's back to basics and back to nature, Pam Cruse said, and SCP is leaning into the idea of "wild wellness" at each of its 10 properties — offering experiences like mushroom foraging in Mendocino and a marine bioacoustics excursion in Costa Rica.
"Wild wellness is a perfect opportunity for us to take advantage of the spaces and places that we already have and not complicate things," she said. "Back to basics is getting out and into nature, standing in the grass, getting in the ocean."
Ken Cruse, co-founder and CEO of SCP, pointed to the value of intentionally communing with nature.
"We've gone through this whole, now centuries-long process of divorcing ourselves from nature, of building a built environment that is designed to protect us from, separate us from, and stand away from the natural world. And what we're finding more and more," he said, "is the more we can be immersed in the wild and become friends again with nature, the more health benefits we will experience from that."
He gave the example of SCP's Corcovado Wilderness Lodge in Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula region, which is remote and surrounded by the ocean on one side and jungle on the other. SCP's guests are offered opportunities for "wild wellness" in both the rainforest and the marine settings, including a "sonic re-wilding" experience with whales.
"We're spending an afternoon or a day, depending on the length of the program, in the ocean with professionals and marine biologists that we work with understand the sounds and this, the vibrations and and the benefits of being within that marine environment," he said.
Something that both Ken and Pam Cruse acknowledged on the podcast is the opportunity for technology to enhance experiences with nature. At Corcovado, the Bioacoustics Expedition uses cutting-edge technology. Plus, personalized wellness is increasingly important to people with wearable devices, so SCP partnered with health platform Japa Health to better provide health-focused, tech-enabled tools.
"We tend to vilify technology," Ken Cruse said. "We have this sort of negative scenario where technology creates a more and more isolationist society. I tend to have a much different view of the world, and my my expectation is that the technology that's helping us to be more productive is also now going to open up the doors for us to become much more social, much more interactive with other human beings — not just nature, as we just talked about, but also with other human beings."
For more from the interview with Pam and Ken Cruse at SCP Hotels, listen to the podcast embedded above.