I’ll look at 2024 as the year that wellness truly broke into the core of hospitality, reshaping how we think about the travel business. While wellness has been a simmering macro trend for over a decade, I’ve never felt such a tangible leap forward in a single year. It’s as if the hospitality industry is reinventing itself in a virtual explosion of new wellness concepts and innovations.

30 years in the making
The industry has come a long way in three decades. When I began in hospitality, most managers had ashtrays on their desks, chainsmoking as they worked. The majority of hotels didn’t have spas. When the GM of my first hotel, a Four Seasons in California, said we were opening one, my initial response was, “What’s a spa?” Wellness wasn’t even on the radar.

Spas started popping up, yet it took much longer for the industry to fully engage in wellness. I spent the early years of my career trying to convince owners, developers and hoteliers that spas were important. The ROI was hard to pin down. Spas were expensive to build and operate. While many hospitality companies debated whether wellness was a worthwhile investment, Mandarin Oriental was one of the first to put spa and wellness at the heart of its brand more than two decades ago.

Over the years, through some Darwinian process of evolution, the hotels with spas seemed to do better than those without. Owners begrudgingly began to agree they were necessary and now they’ve become essential to any high-end hotel, increasingly commanding prominent positions on-site. Today, it’s virtually impossible to find a luxury hospitality company that doesn’t include wellness as a core part of its brand.

Then came COVID-19. Mortality-awareness rose to an all-time high, we experienced unprecedented stress and our relationship with technology went from being extreme to obscene. Participants in Zoom video conference calls, for example, grew by a staggering 30-fold – from 10 million to 300 million. People came out of the pandemic craving wellness.

The hospitality industry, struggling to bounce back, eagerly embraced it as a fundamental component of a more experiential leisure offering to meet the needs of modern travellers. And that brings us to the current day.

Meteor shower of wellness
In 2024, we saw innovations appearing in the marketplace like a meteor shower of wellness cascading down on luxury travellers. These new offerings promise to not only make people feel more energised and transformed from their stay but to help them live longer as well.

In the past year, longevity forerunners Clinique La Prairie opened outposts in Dubai and China and said it’s planning 50 sites in total. Kerzner launched its SIRO fitness and recovery hotel brand and revealed ambitions for 100 more properties. Canyon Ranch introduced Longevity8, a four-day US$20k retreat designed to give you “a road map for the entire journey to live longer”. Sbe unveiled The Estate, its luxury hotel concept based on longevity. Behind the scenes, Mandarin Oriental is working on Wellness 2.0, its own-branded guest-centric vision for the future, which combines physical, emotional, spiritual and even medical aspects of health and wellbeing.

Although the wellness trend in hospitality has been on a steady rise, it feels like we broke through some atmospheric ceiling in 2024. We’re soaring into a new space where the rules of gravity no longer apply. How fast will we accelerate? How far will we go? Nobody knows. But in 2024, the year of wellness, the possibilities have expanded exponentially.

Jeremy McCarthy has worked in the wellness industry for over 30 years. As group director of leisure, spa and wellness for Mandarin Oriental, he oversees facilities at 40 luxury hotels globally. Contact him with your views on Twitter @jeremymcc