The worlds of health and hospitality have been converging over the past two decades, and this trend will only accelerate as now-popular modalities like red light therapy, ice plunges, fitness programs and nutritious F&B menus gain adoption across the chain scale. While the next section addresses how this opportunity intersects with IT, what’s most important now in 2025 to consider is how all these new types of activities and experiences can be loaded into a CRM or CDP then transformed into recurring rooms and ancillary revenues.
Why Care About Wellness?
Your first thought at this point may be, “Wellness isn’t important for my hotel.” That’s fine, but as the back half of this article will demonstrate, wellness is becoming an increasingly significant way for brands to carve out a unique point of differentiation to drive demand, extend LOS and boost ancillaries as measured by TRevPAR. It thus behooves every hotelier to take at least a partial interest in what’s happening in the world of wellness as a means of evolving your brand and growing revenues. Who knows; you may even become a wellness junkie like us and adopt some healthy new lifestyle changes in the processes.
As this is a hospitality technology-focused article, though, your next thought may be, “I’m just an IT Director or CTO while wellness is the domain of spa and recreation.” To this, you are mostly wrong. For one, as industrywide labor continues to get squeezed, the spa will increasingly rely on the various systems, platforms and integrations for efficient merchandizing, payments, scheduling and inventory. There’s no other way that spas in the future will be successful without your tireless work.
Second, as the brief mentions above have hopefully hinted at, wellness itself is far more than just traditional spa services and group yoga classes. While those traditional services (massage, facials and so on) may represent the bulk of current spa or wellness gross revenues, there’s a burgeoning niche of wellness technologies – ‘welltech’ – that’s focused on delivering restorative treatments without proportional increases to labor requirements so that your hotel can achieve more throughput off the same square footage.
Thirdly, and bridging the first two justifications, is the grander notion of the experiences you offer at your property. Wellness can be an experience unto itself – like visiting a spa or medical tourism as a specific reason of selecting a property – or you can look to imbue elements of wellness in and around the activities, gatherings, conferences or in-room stays, augmenting what’s already there to enrich the overall guest experience. To this end, the only way to program these enhancements efficiently is through various technological upgrades. Hence, a wellness-driven brand strategy must involve a visionary CIO or CTO who can see how to seamlessly mold wellness components into the guest journey as part of the greater commercial strategy.
With these as the ‘why care’ now covered, what we see emerging from the introduction of welltech and other wellness products into the hospitality industry is the ability to target health restoration and rejuvenation pathways from a variety of synergistic modes of actions. This is what we mean by ‘multimodal’, where the sum is greater than the parts insofar as outcomes for guests and total revenue generated from said guest.
Multimodal Wellness Experience Example
Specificity can give you a better picture of how multimodal wellness can work as a win-win for the guest and for a hotel’s topline. For one example, let’s look at skincare and antiaging treatments to reduce wrinkles and bestow a more youthful look. Some may say this is vanity, but your skin is your armor against the harshness of the environment around you – radiation, chemicals, pathogens, temperature changes, wind – and there is now a sizeable amount of evidence showing the association between ‘skin age’ and overall health.
Traditional spa services for skin rejuvenation and repair would pertain to face and body treatments where a combination of essential oils in products used, mechanical pressure (massaging that releases tension and trapped toxins), herbal teas with medicinal properties and the calming spa environment all act in unison to this goal. Although already technically multimodal, now we might add in a photobiomodulation session beforehand or afterwards, wherein various wavelengths of light in the red and infrared spectrum have been proven to stimulate collagen synthesis in the deeper layers of the skin.
With infrared generating heat, we are now getting into the territory of ‘contrast therapy’ and whereby the contrast of hot and cold immersion can stimulate the body to increase metabolism and recycle defunct cell part. This category of thermal spas and hydrotherapy can include classic Finnish saunas, steam rooms and IR saunas through to cold plunges, ice baths and cryochambers.
So now you might have a guest coming in for skincare but, instead of only getting a facial or massage, they end up purchasing an entire half-day itinerary of hot-cold, red light therapy and perhaps some other addons that act via other pathways such as pulsed electromagnetic frequencies (PEMF), vibroacoustics or even supplements. With collagen representing 30% of the human body’s total protein, that’s one of the best supplements to start with, although it can be get quite complex after that once you get into the modes of actions for neuroprotectors, adaptogens, nootropics, sirtuin activators, autophagy activators, senolytics and a host of other growing supplement classifications.
And that’s all for just skincare! Now imagine guests who are seeking other outcomes like improved sleep while traveling for an event, enhanced cognition or mood during a stressful business trip or a dedicated ‘wellness-primary’ retreat focused on clean eating, fat loss and reconnecting with the earth. Wherever there’s a desire to improve one’s health, there’s a way to combine various components of physics, chemistry, biology, kinesiology and psychology for a multimodal approach to wellness productization.
The question then is a matter of prompting the purchase. How are you telling your guests about these experiences? At what stage of the guest journey are you designing these itineraries and upselling? Do you have easy online payment rails?
Welltech Leaders Worldwide
The integration of traditional wellness with new age welltech is already happening, primarily in the luxury hotel category. As with most innovations in hospitality, though, it’s inevitable for this trend to seep into the upscale then the midscale in various ways as demand increases and guests of all segments and psychographics start to prioritize a ‘health is wealth’ lifestyle.
In alphabetical order, here are some examples to show the potential for this subcategory:
- Canyon Ranch: Offering an exhaustive range of fitness, introspective and creative activities as part of the daily schedule, as well as advanced screenings like bone density and ultrasounds of blood flow to guide personalized treatments or training (no short description can really do it justice as to the full extent of services here).
- Carillion Miami Wellness Resort: A finely crafted menu of ‘wellness circuits’ that presents the quintessential example of multimodal experiences, with guests selecting a desired outcome (better sleep, muscle recovery or destressing, for instance) then each circuit bundles 4-6 touchless treatments to fit that goal.
- Chenot Palace: A Swiss bulwark since the 1970s whose latest line of signature programmes combines medical consultations, diagnostics, integrated treatments, personalized nutrition and lots of fun welltech (hypoxic exercise training, electrostimulation, neuroacoustics or others) over a one-week stay.
- Clinique La Prairie: Another Swiss brand that’s gone global – and has partnered with Sam Nazarian and Tony Robbins to help launch their preventative medicine hotel brand The Estate – itineraries here include patented nutritional menus, their own line of supplements and tons of integrated therapies.
- Equinox Hotel New York: In addition to a high-end gym with indoor and outdoor pools, as the premier hotel for this fitness brand the rooms are specially configured for sleep quality while the spa offers functional acupuncture and lymphatic drainage massages along with hi-tech light and plasma touchless therapies.
- Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea: This Hawaiian flagship property has collaborated with Next|Health to offer IV drip therapies as well as more advanced stem cell and exosome treatments, with the latter two at infarction-inducing prices (which ironically would necessitate the need for said treatments).
- Lanserhof: With three resort locations in Austria and Germany, this brand is the progenitor of the multi-night, supervised fasting program to safely detox the body, bringing together clean, organic, calorie-light meals with a host of tech-adjacent therapies and personal consultations.
- Lily of the Valley: An idyllic resort near Saint-Tropez that offers a selection of outcome-driven, four-, seven-, ten- and fourteen-night packages with prescribed itineraries that stagger luxury spa services like massage, facials and hammam with physiotherapy, cryotherapy and fantastic French food.
- SHA: A Spanish longevity resort brand that’s just launched its second location in Cancun, their integrated method offers a comprehensive manifest of biorhythm tests, tailored meals (and prescribed beverages in between said meals) and advanced treatments ranging from osteopathy to ozone therapy.
- SIRO: A fitness-focused brand from Kerzner International with its first property in Dubai and its second in Montenegro set to open this summer, in-room touchpoints like zero-gravity recovery chairs and boxing setups are fused with sports-themed group classes in the gym and a la carte welltech like percussive therapy in the spa.
- Six Senses Ibiza: An ultraluxury wellness list wouldn’t be complete without mention of this brand, and in focus here are the RoseBar longevity programs that blend functional diagnostics with biohacking therapies and alternative or Eastern therapies like energy medicine, breathwork and meditation.
- The Ranch: With outposts in Malibu and Hudson Valley, this retreat center doesn’t edge into the welltech domain but is nevertheless worth the mention because of how they program their results-oriented and seasonally adjusted itineraries with a bounty of customizable group classes, hikes, yoga and farm-to-table cuisine.
Automation Is Essential
From the above, the overarching thesis behind all these luxury brands is that there’s an extremely strong present and future lifestyle cohort with people valuing preventative medicine above other discretionary spend categories. Within that great mindset shift, people of all generations are increasingly seeking hotels and health clinics that can provide the services and exceptional experiences to stave off the symptoms of chronic disease or provide antiaging treatments. This will be both ‘wellness primary’ where people travel specifically for health reasons as well as ‘wellness secondary’ where guests want to stay healthy while traveling for other reasons.
Underpinning all these multimodal itineraries and experience sequencing are the systems that can automatically connect available time slots and inventory with customer requests. Right now, that’s handled by bundling objects within a given platform (PMS, IBE, guest messaging, activity management software or otherwise) to sell the overall itinerary package, while on-premises it’s often left up to the individual practitioner to interpret the itinerary rubric into a minute-by-minute progression. The challenge here is that this still represents a lot of manual work to build out each guest’s exact order of events.
It will be the role of IT professionals to guide the process of automating these itineraries while still allowing for flexible customization to fit with guest requests. Much of this will inevitably be done with AI-driven conversational intake forms, but for now, consider that each new piece of welltech amounts to an armada of guest data that can be streamed into a lake or warehouse (with the utmost compliance considerations, of course). This will enable the personalization of future recommendations to repeat visitors to improve upon past outcomes as well as the development of lookalike audiences to guide a solid flow of new and recurrent total revenues.
Above all, this is a category to watch and study, both to see what new welltech is on the horizon as well as how all that data gets transformed into multimodal experiences that can accelerate the improvements to a guest’s wellbeing over a single or multiple stays.
Questions and Answers From This Article
Why is wellness becoming a core focus for hotels in 2025 and beyond?
Wellness is no longer just about spa treatments—it’s now a powerful driver of demand, guest satisfaction, and revenue growth. As more travelers prioritize health, hotels that offer wellness programs can differentiate their brand, extend length of stay (LOS), and increase total revenue per available room (TRevPAR). This shift is reshaping guest expectations across all chain scales, from luxury to midmarket.
What is a multimodal wellness experience, and how does it benefit hotels and guests?
A multimodal wellness experience combines multiple complementary therapies—like red light therapy, saunas, ice baths, massage, and nutritional supplements—into a cohesive guest journey aimed at improving health outcomes. For guests, it amplifies the effectiveness of treatments; for hotels, it increases time-on-property, upselling opportunities, and guest satisfaction. This synergy creates higher revenue per guest with minimal labor increases thanks to “welltech” integration.
How can hotel technology teams support the rise of wellness tourism?
IT leaders are critical in making wellness offerings scalable and profitable through automation, system integration, and personalization. By leveraging platforms like CRM, PMS, and AI-driven intake forms, tech teams can create seamless, personalized wellness itineraries while collecting data to improve future guest experiences. In short, technology is the backbone that transforms wellness from a niche service into a major revenue strategy.