2022 Trend Forecasts Agree: Wellness Is Officially Overtaking Travel Around the New Year, the trend reports start rolling out, and what’s striking is that most of the mainstream travel trend forecasts agree that wellness travel will be a major and growing trend in 2022. As the analysts from the international advertising agency, TBWA’s trends division, Backslash, neatly put it: “Wellness has officially taken over travel.”…
Wellness vacations go beyond massages and diet tips during the pandemic–The New Yorker With the pandemic lingering into its third year, this article interviews hospitality leaders on how the crisis has dramatically accelerated the importance of wellness in travel. Travel is now about healing from physical and mental stress, and people want programming that provides some new answers about how to feel better. Hotels/resorts are…
15 Quick Takeaways from Last Week’s Global Wellness Summit The Global Wellness Summit wrapped up last Friday, and it was a heady three days of dozens of keynotes and panels addressing the many ways that we’re now entering “A NEW New Era of Health & Wellness” The conference, celebrating its 15th anniversary, brought together a historic number of experts from both the medical and wellness worlds (for instance, six doctors and professors from Harvard University keynoted). We could never summarize the depth and diversity of all the talks and conversations there, but at the end of each day, the 2021 co–chairs–Victor Koo, chairman…
Medicine’s Wellness Conundrum–The New Yorker This article discusses the rising commingling of medicine and wellness at hospitals–and how patients and doctors don’t always see eye to eye. Patients demand alternative therapies–touch treatments, mental support and stress-reduction, nutritional advice, etc.–that address them in a more human, holistic way. Far more hospitals now have a wellness facility of some kind, and cancer patients in particular are demanding services that fall under the aegis of wellness. For some physicians, offering…
TREND: Healthcare Meets Wellness–Recent Signs of a New Convergence Our 2021 trend “The Self-Care Renaissance” argued that a new era was upon us–one where the complementary yet often combative relationship between medicine and wellness gets rethought, leading to new conversations and convergences between these two worlds. The pandemic was the shock that has forced healthcare to finally focus on prevention and more holistic models of medicine. At the same time, wellness companies are increasingly forced…
TREND: A Wave of Scent Innovation Fueled by the Pandemic Fragrance is being developed and applied for wellbeing in dramatically new ways Back in 2019, one of our key trends was how fragrance was getting a wellness makeover. With a new understanding of scent’s role in our mental and physical health, there was a new wave of functional fragrances and scent-for-wellbeing applications starting to rise. The pandemic has kicked…
TREND: Fighting Overtourism Moves from Talk to Real Action The experiments–from banning short-term rentals to nixing cruise ships to charging fees to enter a place to marketing only to “conscious travelers”– are really heating up In our 2021 trend “The Year of the Travel Reset,” author and New York Times columnist, Elaine Glusac, predicted that this long travel pause caused by the pandemic would give everyone—consumers and travel suppliers—a rare, crucial opportunity to think of the ways that travel could be…
Biophilia: Not a Passing ‘Trend’ but the Long-Term Future of Architecture and Design Homes, cities, workplaces and hotels intentionally designed to reconnect people with nature are at a major inflection point Biophilic design specifically connects people with the diverse, complex natural world to improve their physical and mental wellbeing. Biophilia is obviously not a new concept: The term was coined by psychologist Erich Fromm in 1964 and made popular by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson in the 80s, whose influential book Biophilia posited that if…
Hospitality brands set sights on lucrative wellness real estate sector Wellness real estate has become a natural—and profitable—extension for brands like Aman Resorts, Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, Mondrian, Montage and more Yesterday, the Global Wellness Summit’s nonprofit sister organization, the Global Wellness Institute (GWI), hosted its inaugural Wellness Real Estate & Communities Symposium in New York and virtually around the globe. (The full day’s presentations and takeaway materials are available on demand.) The event drew hundreds of attendees…
The Oral Microbiome Trend: Putting the Mouth Back in Health & Wellness In our just-released Mid-Year Wellness Trends Update, we explore not only how the gut microbiome has become a burning issue in medicine and wellness in 2021 but how there’s also a new focus on other crucial microbiomes in our body. The “microbiome” refers to ALL the bacteria, viruses and fungi that live in and…
