By Sonal Uberoi, author of The Wellness Asset and founder of Spa Balance, a boutique consultancy working specifically with hotels to help them tap into the full potential of their wellness offering
Or maybe, like many businesses I have worked with, your wellness offering hasn't performed as well as you'd hoped; you may have taken a wrong turn in your thinking, planning or implementation, perhaps due to lack of experience or challenging circumstances. But consumers want wellness and businesses across many industries are embracing the idea of wellness as they reshape their processes, philosophies, and products for the evolved market. Hotels need to do the same.
To put this in financial perspective data from the Global Wellness Institute is clear: In 2018, wellness expenditures were more than half of all health expenditures, coming in at $4.3 trillion. Of the ten markets analysed, between 2015-2017, revenue growth leaders were the spa industry (9.8%), wellness tourism (6.5%) and wellness real estate (6.4%).
We often see ‘wellness' and ‘wellbeing' mistakenly being used interchangeably. However, there is a subtle yet important difference we must get right.
A simple way to view it is: wellness is the tool; wellbeing the goal.
So, wellness provides us with the tools that allow us to access different types of wellbeing goals, e.g. physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. These tools include therapies, alternative medicine, fitness activities, meditation and mindfulness, a balanced diet and a gamut of other services designed to enhance our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
This means that wellness is no longer confined to a specific activity or a physical space such as a spa, a studio or a gym. The definition of wellness is broad and involves anything that enhances overall wellbeing.
So, quite simply, when we incorporate wellness into our lifestyle, or into our product ecosystem as businesses providing wellness services, we provide the stepping-stones towards better wellbeing.
Let's look at what is required to face up to the difficult issues in wellness and how you can move through these and provide the wellness focus your guests are looking for.
Work down - the wellness of your team
Today, many employees have the option to work where they want and how they want, to create a sense of work-life balance. This is not the case for the hospitality industry, where staff face gruelling and antisocial hours that aren't conducive to wellbeing. Companies worldwide have been forced to integrate the wellbeing of their staff into their employment packages and working conditions to retain their talent.
As soon as you accept that you can't solve your guests' wellbeing problems with a team that is ‘unwell' itself, you can start to explore options to make your people's working hours more friendly and conducive to a balanced lifestyle. This needs to work for employees across different generations and different life situations.
You can't ignore your guests
As professionals of the industry, we waste too much time and energy worrying about how to define wellness and how we label our offering and features. We fret over what treatment
and services constitute wellness, when all along our guests really don't care. They just want their wellbeing problems solved, irrespective of how we choose to define things. They won't stop having a massage because one day, as an industry, we decide it is no longer ‘wellness'. As soon as you accept that your guests aren't bothered how you define wellness, you can start to focus on what really matters: the guest. Listen to your guests as they will tell you what they want.
Accept that wellness is a moving feast
Wellness, as we know it, is a relatively new and rapidly growing industry. What was relevant a few years ago might not be important in three or four-years' time. This became even more evident in the pandemic: overnight, people began consuming wellness services in a very different way.
As soon as you accept that some of your products and services will no longer be relevant to your guests, and that you will need to innovate constantly (these can be small tweaks),
you won't feel disheartened when some of your offerings become irrelevant. Instead, you'll keep a strategic eye on how to improve your offering while keeping your guests' needs front and centre.
Wellness cannot be treated as a commodity
Particularly as we come out of the pandemic looking for additional revenue, it is easy to fall into the trap of searching for quick fixes. However, wellness cannot be put into this category, it is not a commodity. Putting wellness at the heart of your offering means growing it over time. It takes commitment, steady work and an outlook focused on the long-term both for growth and profits.
Given this, it will come as no surprise to learn that there is no magic wand you can wave to create and implement the perfect wellness strategy instantly. Making the decision to adopt wellness is the first step on a journey. You will need to develop your knowledge of the wellness business, take on the task and meet the challenges of developing the concept that will work for your hotel, all at the same time as running your core business, managing costs and motivating your staff.
Chasing the latest trends won't work
There are always new ideas, products and services popping up in the wellness industry. It is tempting to rush to adopt the latest trend, perhaps from fear of losing out to a competitor or missing a trick that will bring in some new customers while the fad lasts. But no single new trend will create a wellness ecosystem for your business. You need all the elements of your wellness offering to work in harmony. Yes, this includes treatments and facilities, but it is also about your individual members of staff, your services, and your partners. All must fit together and work together seamlessly. Jumping on the latest trends is more likely to create disjunction and disharmony.
And remember that Wellness is a rapidly growing industry so you will need to be ready to review your strategy and innovate constantly to keep up with what your guests are looking for.
Don't expect specialist staff to do everything
Wellness, like medicine, is a diverse field with a broad range of specialities. Just as we don't expect a general practitioner to be a specialist in every aspect of medicine, we can't expect a personal trainer to know about beauty, or an energy healer to know about high-intensity interval training programmes.
You don't expect your sushi chef to jump in and cook dishes in your Indian restaurant, so don't expect your physiotherapist to jump in and perform pedicures.
The field of wellness has many different specialities, and you need to use the expert practitioners in the roles they have been trained for. If you ask your massage specialist to be able to help a guest with an unrelated beauty treatment you are asking for trouble - the guests will soon notice the lack of expertise and the reduction in quality of advice etc.
Facing up to the tough issues and making wellness your focus, has to start with you as the business owner or leader. Once you have truly accepted that a wellness strategy is not just right for your business, but is something you can personally commit to, then you can work on creating the best offering and supporting your staff, so that your business will have a positive future.
Web: www.spa-balance.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonaluberoi/
