Modern wellness resorts have evolved to run a wide gamut, with properties offering everything from yoga, meditation and spiritual shamanic healing to more medical- and tech-forward programming involving biometric assessments, IV drips and even stem cell therapies.
What counts as a wellness experience has also evolved dramatically. What were once simply hikes, horseback riding and surfing have been rebranded in contemporary wellness as forest bathing, equine therapy and oceanic mindfulness, respectively.
And while some resorts offer structure, enabling guests to reset by way of a strict regimen, others take a more laissez-faire approach, offering leeway to craft a personal take on well-being.
There’s also considerable range in cost. Recent wellness resort expansion has weighed heavily at the high-end, frequently commanding an eye-popping premium, but accessible and often more rustic options are also growing.
While the wellness world may be more complex and crowded than ever, Beth McGroarty, vice president of research and forecasting at the Global Wellness Institute, said that today’s offerings can generally be sorted into one of two categories: hard and soft.
“‘Hard care’ refers to the new, hypermedical, high-tech, super-complex, even more expensive wellness market,” McGroarty said during a wellness trends event in January. “‘Soft care’ refers to a low-pressure, simpler, less expensive, less relentlessly self-optimizing wellness, where emotional and social well-being matter the most.”
That’s not to say the two are mutually exclusive. Demand remains high for both hard and soft care, and the pair often coexist within a single wellness resort ecosystem.
McGroarty predicts, however, that wellness is likely to diverge further in the future, growing both “harder” and “softer” as the segment is increasingly “defined by dramatically different and even contradictory mindsets.”
“There’s no longer one wellness narrative, one unifying trend, one market,” she said.
Here, three Travel Weekly editors delve into the diversity of today’s wellness landscape, sharing their experiences at three wellness properties with very different takes on philosophy, price point and hard care versus soft care mix.
—Christina Jelski
