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Well+Good Founders, Alexia Brue and Melisse Gelula, to Keynote at the Global Wellness Summit
High-profile trends forecasters will analyze how millennials’ wellness and travel habits are disrupting the industry; major survey on what younger travelers seek in wellness travel to be released
Miami, FL – August 2, 2017 – The Global Wellness Summit (GWS), the leading conference for the $3.7 trillion global wellness industry, today announced that the co-founders of wellness media powerhouse Well+Good, Alexia Brue and Melisse Gelula, will keynote at the conference being held at The Breakers Palm Beach, Florida from Oct. 9-11, 2017. In seven short years, Brue and Gelula have built Well+Good into the leading media company dedicated to the U.S. wellness scene, and the top source of intel on the boutique fitness, nutrition, beauty and healthy travel scene. Their highly anticipated annual trends forecast has proven one of the most prescient: predicting everything from the athleisure to the clean beauty to the juicing trend, and covered everywhere from CBS This Morning to The New York Times.
In their Summit keynote they will provide crucial insight into how millennials are now disrupting the wellness travel market. Sharing results from a new survey detailing how their community of 7 million millennial women travel, they will analyze the very different things millennials want in their wellness getaways compared with Boomers: what they seek in fitness, food, and other lifestyle components. And they will connect the dots between millennials’ wellness and travel spending behaviors and how hospitality brands offering wellness programming can start benefiting from them.
“The wellness market is booming in cities far beyond New York and LA, with barre studios, avocado toast and smoothie bars becoming a true global phenomenon in 2017,” noted Gelula. “And we’re excited to present on future transformations in wellness travel. For instance, if spas were once ‘fix-me!’ destinations for boomers who knew little about wellness, modern consumers – especially millennials – increasingly have their own very sophisticated wellness tastes. The result: far more people now travel to deepen their existing wellness practice, rather than have their wellness light switched on.”
“Millennials are the most wellness-obsessed group ever, consuming more healthy products and services, on average, than any generation before. They have their own local wellness gurus, whether their trusted yoga or meditation teacher,” noted Brue. “And they crave vacations and retreat experiences curated by these trusted experts over legacy spa brands whose names they might know but don’t necessarily trust. There is much to discuss: including the growing transfer of trust from the destination spa brand to the local wellness expert and what ‘brands’ and experiences will matter more in the future.”
More about Alexia Brue & Melisse Gelula:
Alexia Brue, co-founder and CEO of Well+Good, guides the company’s strategic direction and leads the revenue and business development functions. She brings her journalistic background to bear on driving creative marketing solutions for brands, ensuring that client programs have the same DNA as the site’s authoritative content. Prior to founding Well+Good, Brue covered health and wellness for publications as diverse as Vogue and The New York Times, and she is the author of Cathedrals of the Flesh, a travel memoir about the world’s great bathing cultures. She attended Grinnell College and the Columbia School of Journalism.
Melisse Gelula, co-founder and chief content officer at Well+Good, leads the company’s 20+ editorial team in applying journalistic reporting standards to the wellness lifestyle, which led to the Webby Award for “Best Health Site” in 2017. She’s an expert on natural beauty that frequently speaks at major conferences on wellness, beauty, and digital trends, and is oft featured as an industry expert at major news outlets like CBS This Morning and The New York Times. She is the former editor-in-chief of SpaFinderLifestyle.com, beauty director at Luxury SpaFinder Magazine, and travel editor at Fodor’s Travel Publications. She holds an MA from the University of Toronto and completed six years of training as a psychoanalyst.
“The U.S. is very much an experimental laboratory for wellness concepts, and Alexia and Melisse’s reporting and trends forecasting on what’s cutting edge in fitness, nutrition, beauty and wellness travel has had a wide impact,” said Susie Ellis, GWS CEO and chairman. “Their keynote on how millennials will continue to rewrite the wellness landscape will be provocative and profound, and will leave delegates talking and debating…the very heartbeat of the Summit.”
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About the Global Wellness Summit: The Global Wellness Summit (GWS) is an invitation-only international gathering that brings together leaders and visionaries to positively shape the future of the $3.7 trillion global wellness economy. Held in a different location each year, Summits have taken place in the U.S., Switzerland, Turkey, Bali, India, Morocco, Mexico and Austria. The next one will be held at The Breakers Palm Beach, Florida from Oct. 9-11, 2017.
