Health Update: Health Update: How the wealthy do healthy travel – What Experts Say– What Experts Say.
When one of the world’s greatest hotel schools, the 1893-founded EHL Hospitality Business School (formerly the École Hôtelière de Lausanne), suggests that hotels will get left behind unless they integrate wellness into their hospitality offering, it’s clear how vital healthy living has become to today’s travellers. In the past, visitors would travel to specific regions to tap into local wellbeing practices — India for Ayurvedic healing, California for detox, Finland for saunas, Turkey for steam baths. Today, the report by EHL says — citing a growing international wellness industry worth about $8.5 trillion a year — that travellers, especially Gen Zers, expect to be able to spend their holidays getting fitter and healthier wherever they are.
That doesn’t necessarily mean checking into a spa, according to a Future of Wellness report by McKinsey. Rather, travellers are tapping into effective, data-driven, science-backed health solutions where they’re staying to improve their health, fitness, nutrition, appearance, sleep and mindfulness. Those might include traditional methods such as yoga, meditation and walking outdoors, as well as digital aids such as personalised health tracking devices and mental health apps.
Hotel wellness retreats
The lap pool at Kamalaya wellness retreat in Thailand
Such is the demand from travellers for health holidays that some resorts have now developed programmes to cater for long-term guests. In Thailand, for instance, the wellness retreat Kamalaya offers high-tech interventions alongside healthy living regimes for those wanting a total reset for a month or two. In Greece, Euphoria has created longevity retreats for up to 21 days, with a two-month online follow-up to ensure new healthy routines are being implemented at home. In Mexico, Transform Mental Health Retreat offers a 29-day retreat for those suffering from grief, heartbreak or burnout. And in Kerala, India, a vast new wellness centre called Tulah will open this year, offering both short and long-term retreats, utilising methods from a wide range of medical systems including western, Chinese and Ayurvedic.
Rwanda’s new palatial spa
Bisate Sanctuary, located on the edge of Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda
Seeing a gorilla family in the wild is not just an extraordinary privilege, and a bucket list experience for many. It is also often pretty hard work, involving hiking up slippery mountain trails, clambering over walls and cutting through bamboo thickets to track the creatures. Which is why Bisate, the luxury Rwandan lodge owned by Wilderness, has just opened one of Africa’s most spacious, and individual, spas on the continent on the edge of Volcanoes National Park — so guests can recover.
The Sanctuary is inspired by a Rwandan palace, with floor-to-ceiling sheets of glass
Everything within the Sanctuary’s walls is inspired by Rwanda
As one might expect of Wilderness, the spa consists of far more than just a few treatment rooms alongside a lodge. It’s an enormous standalone triple-height wellness centre formed like a snail’s shell, with beehive-shaped rooftops, walls inspired by a Rwandan palace and floor-to-ceiling sheets of glass. Guests can look out as they’re swimming, having a sauna or just relaxing by a fireplace. Their view takes in the potato fields, the pockets of remaining cloud forests and the cloud-topped Bisoke volcano that characterise this dramatic little corner of Africa.
Designed to be what the COO Alexandra Margull describes as a place “to pause, reconnect and rediscover the restorative power of nature”, it’s been designed by Caline Williams-Wynn, of Artichoke Design, who has created camps in Africa including Jabali Ridge and Mombo. Everything within its walls has been inspired by Rwanda. Some walls have been crafted using great squares of stone, as well as bricks arranged in unusual patterns: sticking out like porcupine quills or in waves inspired by the Land of a Thousand Hills. Curvaceous passageways are covered with giant vertical spears of bamboo. Hanging lights are shaded with carved stalactites of white quartz and the sauna is lined with square tiles of wood, jutting out at angles. Even adornments have been locally made: walls woven from reeds in graphic patterns, ceilings hung with raffia fringing, chandeliers coloured with green recycled glass and corners enlivened by graphic monochrome Rwandan baskets.
The aim is that guests will come between hikes and treks to relax. To steam, sauna and swim beneath a domed brick ceiling in the indoor 16m lap pool, to have spoiling treatments using botanical Theranaka and Esse potions, or just to lie and watch the clouds scudding by. For those wanting to relax at night, the lighting will be dimmed and the fire lit to make it a cosy hangout.
The spa and pool are located under a domed brick ceiling
The gym is equipped with wooden Nohrd equipment
In true Artichoke Design style, every detail has been considered: the bathrooms, robes and slippers are coloured the same vivid greens as the landscape; the spacious gym is equipped with eco-friendly wooden Nohrd equipment; even the tiles in reception are painted with Imigongo patterns indigenous to Rwanda.
If it’s a success, Wilderness plans to replicate the Sanctuary in other camps. Work has already begun at Mombo in Botswana. As they put it: “Wellness is felt in the absence of distraction — the lack of noise, light and air pollution — and in the sensory reawakening that takes place when one is truly present in nature. Simply being in the wild becomes a form of healing in itself.” Particularly if you’re in a wilderness inhabited by gorillas…
Doubles at Bisate Reserve from $6,638 (£4,700) a night, all-inclusive, wildernessdestinations.com
The latest philanthropic wellness safari
The rooms of Sashwa have spacious creamy interiors and bush views
MAIKE MCNEILL/HONEST WORK
Peter Eastwood didn’t intend, he says, to buy the 1,000-hectare Mvuu Game Reserve adjoining Kruger National Park or to build a safari camp. The New Zealander invested in the South African land because it was formerly a hunting concession with a Voortrekkers youth camp on it “and all the kids that went there were white”, he says matter-of-factly. “I knew that there were thousands of kids in regions around us that were black and who had never seen a leopard, or a rhino … If we’re going to try and stop poaching, and for conservation to have any impact, education is vital.”
Having transformed the Voortrekkers camp into a place he named Koru, to which NGOs could bring local children — “and teachers and grannies, in fact anyone who wants to learn about conservation” — on a two-night introductory safari, in 2023 he opened a luxury wellness safari camp, Sashwa River of Stars, to generate funds to maintain his philanthropic vision.
The aim of the lodge is to move guests “from a human doing to a human being”
MAIKE MCNEILL/HONEST WORK
The heart of the property consists of a wellness centre, spa and gym
MAIKE MCNEILL/HONEST WORK
Like Koru, Sashwa isn’t an ordinary safari camp. Rather it was designed as a place for guests to slow down, reflect and heal within nature. While there are game drives and walks on offer, the heart of the property consists of a wellness centre, spa and gym. Mornings start with meditation and yoga, and in between plant-based meals guests can have massages, destress muscles in the Himalayan salt-walled sauna and spend time in the art studio, drawing or painting, or look out from decks over the bush and passing creatures.
The idea, Eastwood says, is to allow guests to “check out of their busy lives and check into the bush. It’s the ultimate healer. People just need time to feel it” — and transform themselves, as he puts it, “from a human doing to a human being”. The 12-room camp, with spacious creamy interiors and bush views, will organise several retreats a year focusing on cooking, conservation and birding, and will host outside experts to lead specific retreats.
The next retreat — a six-night yoga retreat in March — costs from R48,840 (£2,200) pp all-inclusive. sashwa.org