Health Update: Emotionality, Wellness, and Longevity: Demand and Risk Mitigation Through 2030 – What Experts Say

Wellness and Longevity Program Themes

1. Biometrics: Ultra-personal wellness plans with advanced AI wearables
2. Medical: AI diagnostics for cellular, genetic, and neurological testing
3. Social: Hydrothermal, PT recovery facilities, and new community programs
4. Emotional: Spiritual pursuits, retreats, and creative arts workshops
5. Digital: Apps of all kinds that support tracking, actions, and outcomes
6. Nature: Environmental awareness, recreation, instinct, and ecology
7. Nourishment: Local food, nutritional impact, and new water technologies
8. Mental: Mind-gym applications and new technologies for stress, grief, and coping
9. Detox: Life offline, fewer distractions, more mindfulness, and less screen time
10. Relationships: Systems to improve interpersonal, social, and emotional skills

Service, Sentiments, and Standards

The beautiful thing about wellness-hospitality is its dynamism. It’s refreshing. It inspires, and it transforms. This creates powerful new opportunities for creative and diverse programs to advance and emerge everywhere. It’s less about what everyone else is doing and trying to replicate that, and more about what guests want and need, where they are. Who they are and what they don’t see with their eyes—but seek in a feeling. It’s less about what’s trending and more about what has real value for both the guests and the people who curate and support them.

The truth is, it’s not enough to provide a good service. These have affectionately evolved with the sentiment that wellness-hospitality is and is supposed to mean more.

It’s common to see a range of spa and wellness programs at the top of the market supply. Meanwhile, what is often forgotten is that these programs must have the impact to last, the stamina to stay in place, and the agility to evolve—creating anything that washes out when the tides change isn’t built to last. And the tides are changing.

Sometimes it feels like the pandemic was yesterday. People adapted quickly. As AI continues to advance and technologies become more fit and essential to the process, the power of choice still wins out. From deciding where to go, for how long, and with whom… booking efficiencies only go so far as preferences once again diverge from typical norms and become increasingly less about efficiency and convenience and more about meaning and value.

Life is emotional. There is a plethora of research showing that between 70% and 95% of decisions are made emotionally and subconsciously. This naturally applies to travel, leisure destinations, and even business travel. As life gets busy, it’s easy to forget the underpinnings of why we choose to do things. How are we choosing, and what fundamentally matters? In business and operations, it’s easier to observe the structure of a safe strategy and track performance data without considering emotional nuance or the potential, yet enormous, risks. Yet the very foundation that builds the baseline is always forged by emotion and choice, while simultaneously mitigating risks.

Complexity and Demand

Hotel and resort services have experienced increasing pressure to meet new and ongoing changes in demand preferences. This has not only challenged the market financially and operationally but also widened the lanes of transformation. What were once viewed as basic hotel amenities, such as spas, have since transitioned to a global spa-and-wellness market to wellness-hospitality assets, and now to robust wellness and longevity objectives.

The Wellness Tourism sector is estimated to reach nearly $1 trillion in global value by the end of 2025, alongside the Longevity market, which is expected to close out 2025 valued at $600 billion globally. Both sectors show ambitious CAGRs and market growth through 2030. Given likely overlaps, this still reveals significant global growth in both categories. Meanwhile, it’s essential to remember that these industries were barely considered a part of hospitality just a decade ago. Wellness hospitality didn’t experience significant market momentum until 2017.

There’s no question that the rising demand for well-being and services that support longevity has notably shifted the global hospitality market over the last ten years. At the same time, new applications, tools, and technologies continue to advance and improve with increasing speed. This makes pipeline development and planning an ever-evolving, more delicate process. These changes raise questions not only about who and where, but also about why and how to consider unseen risk and choice fragilities. This also makes the procurement process and FF&E selections distinctly more challenging, requiring greater care in investment decisions and in assessing long-term product viability. Will these investment choices maintain their value and thrive, or will they be at risk and possibly underperform in the next cycle?

Disruption, Economic Shifts, and Have-Nots

Spa and wellness experiences remain commonly found in luxury and prime property offerings. This may be the case for a while. As gaps in status, income, and wherewithal grow, this is likely to further alienate people from the ability to select these kinds of experiences. This will likely tighten future guest metrics and create new demographic segmentation. This can also alter demand due to affordability concerns with increasing spending hesitations. The rate of change is significant with movement across all industries. People feel it. It’s been in the air for a while.

In a previous article in 2023, I wrote “Choices and Sentience for Stability and Growth Through 2026.” In this, I highlighted post-pandemic strategies that emphasized the ongoing need for preparedness as part of wellness-hospitality and hotel and resort strategies. I’ve been writing about these topics and market turns since 2012. Today, we have some of the same and many new shifts to consider and prepare for. This isn’t meant to taint market optimism. This is intended to inspire greater contemplation and encourage future-readiness.

Potential Market Disruptions

1. Economic turbulence: Wide and general, with increasing travel inflation
2. Shifting currencies: Value, spending, and global tourism accessibility
3. Materials: Costs of products, goods, and supply chain disruptions
4. Employment: Staff reductions, automations, and evolving efficiency targets
5. Income demographics: Increasing disparities and spending hesitations
6. Perceived value: Elitism, personal economic agency, and social frictions
7. Location: Severe weather and increasing changes to regional weather systems

In addition to these macro-level issues, we can expect adjustments to traditional expense structures, including payroll, utility rate costs, and insurance premiums. We may see more insurance and coverage restrictions, rate increases on group policies, and a collective effort towards ‘pay more, get less.’ Since 2020, health insurance premiums in the U.S. have increased by 26%, far exceeding average wage growth.

Simplifying Solutions

Understanding how changes in behavior affect emotions and choices is an integral part of unlocking potential while keeping things simple. The key to simplifying the intricacies of choice lies in dissecting demand and retention metrics. It is critical to understand why they choose you, and what they love or don’t love about making this choice.

At a time when hospitality innovation should be widely embraced, novelty and complexity often delay or derail new-to-market business models. Not because these concepts aren’t viable, but more often because conventional thinking keeps old systems in play. Meanwhile, it’s essential to realize that status quo solutions are not well-suited to address the new and unseen issues that lie ahead. These will be unfamiliar, and they will need new solutions.

Preparing for upcoming changes doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. There are a variety of ways to mitigate risk that also help secure interesting and successful outcomes. Start by identifying and understanding the dynamics of potential issues. Then, framing simple and innovative solutions that have the resilience necessary to adapt quickly, and maintain strategic strength over time.

Solutions and Planning

1. Management: Create systems that optimize agility in asset performance
2. Concept and Core: Enhance clarity of concept, value, and meaning
3. Connectedness: Support interpersonal skills development for social guest services
4. Emotionality: Support employee needs and easy access to mental health services
5. Building and Development: Add sustainability without over-sacrificing staff and merit
6. Renovations: Avoid planning for today; understand what you will need in 5 years
7. Repositioning: Diligently understand guest preferences and demand dynamics
8. Budget Revisions: Review and prepare for increasing costs and rising expense margins

I’ve said this before, but it stands worth repeating. Choosing to activate AI applications while protecting human and social values is vital. Instead of aiming for broad efficiencies, strive for a good balance. General hotel and resort asset management paradigms often misunderstand or fail to fully appreciate vital departmental aspects necessary to optimize them. This can lead to unintended stagnation and underperformance. Moreover, this can hinder the discovery and exploration of new directions and miss timely opportunities for growth.

Depending on the type of property, integrating specialized support with other asset management systems on a quarterly or semi-annual basis can provide valuable insights. This offers distinct department expertise and expert oversight to leverage new ideas and recommend changes in fiscal cycles as needed.

Final Thoughts

Despite exciting growth projections, we should remain cautiously optimistic in the years ahead. While every economy has its upside, in the years to come, we are likely to see a significant move away from what we now consider conventional hospitality. This means greater market mobility and more pronounced swings in preferences. The upcoming changes will be extraordinary in both good and bad ways, and the grit to understand them and navigate through them will require more than status quo solutions.

At a time when social, political, and lifestyle divisions have only increased. The emotionality of choice is but a human one. The Wellness and Longevity markets are going strong. However, identifying and understanding potential market fragilities is critical to having the capacity to cope and creatively solve them. Just because the bandwagon sounds pretty good doesn’t mean everyone really likes the same music.

Reflecting on the last decade, we know that sudden events can change everything. New sectors and demand can surface and shift quickly. For many, it has been back to business as usual, comfortable planning, and relying on tried-and-true systems of the past. Planning for tomorrow is like expecting to wake up to another new day, like the last. It’s easy to romanticize the past with sentiments and lessons of nostalgia. It takes courage to embrace and romance the future. Planning for a rapidly changing future requires more energy, flexibility, and different mental and emotional effort.