Five Wellness Experiences to Enjoy in Nature

There’s nothing like a global pandemic to wake people up to the wonders of Mother Nature, whether it’s in the form of countryside, coastline or mountains. And that’s not by chance. The science behind the benefits of nature is proven, to the point where both doctors and wellness practitioners are increasingly prescribing outdoor activities that reap medicinal benefits, without the side effects. This “discovery” of the healing power of nature has pushed wellness vacations in nature to the top of health-conscious travelers’ lists. Here are five ways up your wellness quotient naturally, on your next trip.

Find Open Sky

There are few things more awe-inspiring than gazing up at a night sky untouched by light pollution. Stars that you didn’t even know existed glimmer brightly, and constellations and the Milky Way are easily visible. Looking up at a dark sky is a stellar wellness experience, often resulting in a meditative, beta-wave state.

If you want to take a star trek, head first to the International Dark-Sky Association website. IDSA certifies places with night sky-friendly lighting. The best of the best are called Dark Sky Sanctuaries. There are only ten of them in the entire world, and only one is in the United States. Cosmic Campground is in the Gila National Forest in the western part of New Mexico. Those with a fear of the dark need not apply. The closest source of man-made light is about 40 miles away. There aren’t a lot of hotels around here, either. So, after gazing up, you might want to plunk yourself down in Silver City, which is about an hour away.

Woodland Wellness

Since being developed in Japan 40 years ago, forest bathing has become somewhat of a global sensation. We’re not just talking about a walk in the woods here. A forest bath is a total immersion into the sights, sounds and smells of the woods. Several American resorts now offer guided forest bathing experiences as part of their wellness menus.

The Lodge at Spruce Peak is a year-round resort located in Stowe, Vermont. Its guided excursion explores the Green Mountains. Don’t be surprised if the guide asks you to take off your shoes, as contact with the wet, cool ground is believed to create a stronger connection to nature. The Lodge at Woodloch in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains brags about its certified Forest Bathing Specialists, who lead two-hour jaunts that focus on breathing and mind-clearing.

Say Hay

Sleeping on hot, wet hay was first popularized in Italy’s Dolomites. Farmers who cut hay used to sleep on it after a long day of work. But the new version of the practice is not just a roll in the hay. Wellness-seeking straw sleepers will instead find themselves wrapped in bales infused with fermented mountain herbs. The active substances in the herbs have a calming and anti-inflammatory action, and are said to strengthen the immune system and promote circulation.

While hay bathing is offered at many resorts in the Dolomites and has also spread to some places in Eastern Europe, it’s not a wellness option easily found in North America. Right now, the best bet may be a visit to Chicago’s Piva Beer Spa. As its name suggests, this place offers soaking rooms with wooden tubs filled with a brew of barley, hops and brewer’s yeast. After soaking up the beer bath, guests are moved to a relaxation room, where they lie on beds of hay. For those who want to roll straight from the hay to a comfy mattress, the closest hotel is The Robey, located in trendy Wicker Park.

Hot Spring Bubbles

The healing powers of hot springs have been appreciated for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans and the Founding Fathers were all fans of natural waters warmed geothermally. Due to their high mineral contact, hot springs are reputed to have a number of therapeutic benefits, including boosting immunity and circulation, reducing stress and relieving pain.

There are plentiful natural hot springs throughout the Mountain West. However, many are hard to find, and don’t have facilities nearby. To soak without roughing it, check out the Colorado Historic Hot Springs Loop. If you follow the entire 720-mile route in the western part of the state, you can experience hot springs in 17 different destinations. Two of the top resort towns along the loop are Pagosa Springs and Glenwood Hot Springs.

Knee-Deep in Kneipping

Back in the 19th century, a German priest named Sebastian Kneipp revolutionized naturopathy. He came up with an idea to develop nature trails where people would wander barefoot through hot and cold water, and over sand, pebbles and forest ground. Countless Germans swear by the practice. While kneipping courses are abundant in the old country, Kneipp knowledge hasn’t seemed to translate to North America. So, if you want to try kneipping without stepping on a plane, head to a forest dotted with glacial waters and set your own course. Give kneipping a whirl, for example, in the Adirondacks or Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

A version of this article appeared on the Orbitz blog.

Hotels Use Technology and Design to Evolve the Healthy Room

This article originally appeared in the Skift New Luxury Newsletter, for which I am the chief correspondent.

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Can a hotel room make you healthier? The jury is still out, but judging from some recent experiments, there may be more than a nugget of truth to the idea.

A Wellness Room at the Four Seasons Los Angeles at Beverly Hills

Delos, which pioneered the term “wellness real estate”, introduced the concept of an uber-healthy hotel room at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada back in 2012. It is now bringing its Wellness Rooms to the Four Seasons Los Angeles at Beverly Hills. At the same time, Swissôtel is expanding its own version of a healthy room.

In all cases, the idea is to incorporate health-boosting technologies and ambient design elements to improve wellness. We are talking about things like special lighting to counter jet lag, aromatherapy, dawn simulator alarm clocks, special air purification systems and wisdom from Deepak Chopra. Okay, only Delos has Chopra on board. His knowledge, along with that of the Cleveland Clinic, has been incorporated into the programs offered at MGM and Four Seasons.

The Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills launched its partnership with Delos at the end of November 2017. Located on the hotel’s spa level, five wellness-themed guest rooms and two suites combine the latest technology from Delos, along with a stylish room aesthetic and the eco-chic features you would expect in L.A.

According to Michael Newcombe, general manager and chair of the company’s Global Spa and Wellness Task Force, the concept has potential to become ubiquitous.  Having a “room product dedicated to supporting a wellness-based lifestyle while on the road… is a choice that hoteliers will have to get used to.”  The concept will be tested through July 1, 2018, at which time guest feedback will be assessed. If guests give the thumbs up, the plan is to add more such rooms at the Beverly Hills property and beyond.

The Vitality Suite at Swissôtel Zurich 

Meanwhile, in Switzerland, a new wellness room concept is taking shape at Swissôtel. The Swissôtel Zurich is still tinkering with its Vitality Suite, which it introduced at the end of 2016. It’s an evolution of the company’s ongoing Vitality program aimed at “inspiring travelers to maintain an active and energized body and mind while on the road.” Until last year, that program had been focused on food and fitness offerings. But according to Lilian Roten, vice president of brand management for Swissôtel and Pullman,  “We realized that we had to bring this vitality focus into the guestroom… to package it up and build a room that would be the embodiment of vitality.”

And so, Swissôtel has reconfigured one of its conventional suites into a hardcore wellness sanctuary. Design elements include hardwood floors, soft color palettes, ergonomically-functional furniture, black-out blinds and bathrooms with spa features like aromatherapy and chromatherapy tubs.

There’s also a great deal of attention paid to allowing guests to personalize their experience. For example, company literature says, “In a first for the hotel industry, circadian light is accommodated on demand. Circadian light features allow light color to change, influencing the secretion of melatonin in the brain, helping travelers overcome jet-lag or lack of sunlight,” along with enhancing the quality of sleep.

The Wellbeing Wall in the Swissôtel Zurich's Vitality Suite 

Meantime, the built-in Wellbeing Wall offers guests a variety of training options, as it contains dumbbells, horizontal bars and cable-pull systems.  A multilingual cyber-trainer via a touch-screen monitor displays exercises geared towards strengthening, stretching, meditation and breathing.

There are plans to develop Vitality Rooms in North America and Asia. The Swissôtel Chicago is slated to be the first hotel outside of Switzerland to introduce the concept, most likely next year. In Asia, the company’s Singapore property will be the first to get an update.

“What we are looking into is evaluating what regional adaptations would be necessary to make rooms relevant for various markets,” said Roten.

At the same time, she notes, certain features will always be mandatory. Among them are floors uncovered by carpet; work areas with adjustable desks with options for standing or sitting; bathroom spa experiences; and a Wellbeing Wall. Inclusion of an air purification system will only be required in cities with air quality indexes above 50 (that’s you, Beijing).

While the Vitality Room per se will be exclusive to Swissotel, Roten says that other AccorHotels brands are likely to incorporate aspects of the concept over time.

Meantime, back in the United States, Delos Stay Well rooms have been introduced to half a dozen Marriott properties on the East Coast during the past year. Should Marriott and AccorHotels fully buy in, healthy rooms may prove to have legs beyond luxury brands.

Pass the Avocado Toast: Updating the Spa Experience for a New Generation

What do millennials want out of a luxury wellness experience? Apparently, avocado toast. That’s just one of the findings lifestyle publication Well+Good discovered after surveying 4,600 of its readers.

californiaavocado.com

Unlike days of yore, when the only way to discover wellness concepts was by going to iconic high-end destination spas like Canyon Ranch and Miraval, today, wellness is accessible nearly everywhere.

You can take a high-intensity interval training class or sip on a matcha latte anywhere from Boise, Idaho to Baltimore, Maryland. There’s the entire urban landscape extending to second-tier and tertiary cities supporting what were once fringe wellness practices and pabulums confined to the likes of Los Angeles or New York.

Alexia Brue and Melisse Gelula co-founded Well+Good in 2010. They presented the findings of the company’s Wellness Travel Survey at the Global Wellness Summit in October.

The ubiquity of wellness is a big part of the reason, says Brue, that millennials aren’t impressed with the iconic spa brands, many of which have traditionally appealed to clientele getting the wellness light switched on for the first time.

But another reason, she says, is simply that this generation doesn’t know these brands. “Starting in the late 1990s through the early aughts,” says Brue, “the iconic spa has not been a part of the cultural currency.”  In pre-Internet days, seekers would discover these retreats thanks to fawning articles and splashy advertising in glossy travel magazines.  But this generation gets its information online, and as Brue notes, “These brands haven’t been part of the social media conversation.”  That’s part of the reason the millennial wellness getaway mindset has traveled elsewhere.

In a game of “would you rather,” the Well+Good survey discovered that a slim majority of the respondents would opt to go to an iconic spa (55 percent) over a guru-led retreat (40 percent). However, Gelula calls the results “shocking,” given that they were expecting an 80/20 differential in favor of the old-school spa.

According to the Well+Good co-founders, the spa attendees in the audience at The Global Wellness Summit were surprised, too. “The spas don’t even realize that their biggest competition isn’t other spas,” says Brue. “Fitness and lifestyle instructors leading retreats are the competition,” says Brue. Indeed, it’s increasingly common for self-branded wellness gurus with large social media followings to organize their own wellness retreats to exotic destinations around the world.

Cambodia is one of the exotic destinations popular for guru-led wellness retreats.

For spa resort executives who might be comforting themselves by thinking it’s all about the price tag, they are wrong, according to Gelula. “They are convincing themselves that if they are not attracting millennials, it’s because millennials aren’t taking luxury trips.” But that’s not true. Millennials do have disposable income (although not necessarily as much free time. According to to the survey, younger wellness seekers are more likely to take a three-day getaway rather than the traditional one-week spa stay). When it comes to retreats versus spas, she says, “it’s important to point out that we aren’t seeing much of a price point difference. Retreat leaders often charge between $700 and $1000 a day.

Brue also believes that some of the iconic spas, instead of trying to appeal to millennials today, are just waiting until they start getting aches and pains. The problem with that approach, says Brue, is that “millennials don’t have a ‘fix me now’ mentality when they go to a spa.” Because they are already incorporating wellness in their everyday life, when they go on a wellness getaway, they want an elevated experience that builds on their daily practices, but doesn’t replicate them.

Gelula says, “Spas are simply are out of the loop in terms of what travelers expect from a wellness retreat.” So, what do today’s wellness warriors want? The number one priority, according to the survey, is food. Ninety-nine percent of the respondents said the quality of the food was a key factor in their decision-making process.

Ninety-seven percent of the survey respondents wanted cultural offerings to be part of the package. That doesn’t necessarily mean experiencing a Lomi Lomi massage in Hawaii, but rather going to a destination where the surroundings themselves provide a broadening experience. That’s part of the reason guru-led retreats are starting to get a leg up. They can roam from place to place from year to year, plunking down in up-and-coming destinations in order to incorporate a greater cultural component into the programming mix.

The Well+Good survey also found the nature experiences (96 percent) and high quality fitness offerings (94 percent) were important, with spa services (93 percent) rounding out the top five.

So, how can the iconic spa bring offerings up to date? Gelula recommends starting with the menu. “Focus on food,” she says. “Provide cool wellness food offerings. After all, consumers are used to eating avocado toast, avocado smoothies and cauliflower rice at home…or seeing them on Instagram.” In addition to menu updates, Brue says spas need to hire higher-quality fitness instructors, and to add more personalization to the spa programming.

All in all, the co-founders of Well+Good suggest spas need to change now or risk becoming dinosaurs. As Gelula notes, “The value proposition has to keep pace with this sophisticated group of travelers. One thing we confirmed with the survey results: Spa experiences for millennials should focus on deepening already-existing wellness practices.”

This story originally appeared in the Skift New Luxury Newsletter.

It's the Experience, Dude

Based on information supplied by yours truly during a radio interview for Washington, DC's WTOP,  Rachel Nania did a write-up. **

Travel Trends for Adventure Seekers: It's About the Experience

WASHINGTON — Gone are the days when windsurfing, parasailing or zip-lining qualified as a unique vacation adventure. Today’s travelers are upping the ante and redefining what it means to live it up.

Laura Powell, travel expert and writer for The Daily Suitcase, says the latest craze doesn’t involve jetting off to the most exotic locations — it’s all about collecting experiences.


Riding around Saigon, Vietnam on a scooter is a hair-raising
experience, even with a helmet on. Only attempt it
as the passenger of an experienced driver.
(Courtesy Laura Powell)

“The world is pretty much open to all, so in order to have that different kind of adventure, you need to have a unique experience, as opposed to solely going to an offbeat place,” she says.**

And throughout that experience, collecting the best photos, composing the best tweets and checking in at the most interesting locations is imperative. “Now that everyone is trying to outdo each other on social media, the more unusual the experience, the better,” Powell says.

Ready to plan your next trip?  Here’s how you can make sure your Instagram account gets more likes.

In 2016, AmaWaterways and Backroads will team up for
bicycling-focused cruises to Vietnam and Cambodia, along with
several European destinations.
Above: Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

Travel with your taste buds

While some prefer to soak up a city’s culture by visiting museums and historic sites, others prefer to slurp it up with authentic bowls of ramen and heaping servings of pasta. Food tourism is a booming industry, and there are more options available for tourists looking to get a taste — or a sip — of foreign destinations.

“Whereas it used to be you [could go] to a cooking school, now you can do even more,” Powell says.
In Italy, travelers can tour a pasta factory or have Sunday dinner with grandma; Switzerland offers a variety of cheese and chocolate tours; and tourists in Bangkok can ride a boat through a traditional floating market. Plus, there are companies such as Home Food and Bookalokal that make it possible for travelers to attend dinner parties hosted by locals.

Cruise the water by night and bike paths by day

AmaWaterways recently launched a partnership with the adventure company Backroads to create a journey that combines cruising, biking and hiking. (Courtesy Backroads)

One cruise company is rocking the boat with its nontraditional tours.
AmaWaterways is teaming up with the adventure company Backroads to create a journey combining cruising, biking and hiking.

By night, guests who sign up for the Backroads adventure cruise can dine and sleep on the boat as it travels up river. During the day, they’re led on biking and/or hiking adventures with Backroads tour guides. Powell notes that the bike and cruise adventure is currently limited to the Danube River route. But, the itineraries will expand to other rivers throughout Europe and Asia in 2016.

A new degree of adventure

From Canada to Copenhagen, ice bars and ice hotels were once the rage. “All of the sudden, everywhere that had a cold winter had an ice hotel,” Powell says. But a chilling new destination is taking the excitement over ice structures to a whole new level. In June, travelers will be able to walk into the ice tunnels and caves of Langjökull, Europe’s second largest glacier. “They’ve burrowed out a tunnel within the glacier, so that people can actually go ice tunneling in the middle of a glacier," Powell says.

Peek inside the tunnels of Langjökull:


Experience nothing

In a constantly connected world where it’s hard to escape work, no matter how many miles are between you and the office, it’s no surprise that some travelers are in need of a little peace and quiet on vacation. And the travel industry is taking notice.

“Another thing people are interested in experiencing these days is nothing,” Powell says. She adds: “Silence tourism is kind of the next big thing.  There’s growing demand for places where people can get away, walk in nature, and not necessarily have access to Wi-Fi and cell service.”

In fact, “Silence, please,” is the slogan on Finland's official travel site. The slogan is accompanied by recommended escapes to remote lakeside cottages, igloo huts in the middle of the forest and foraging tours through the Finnish forest.


For original article, follow this link: http://wtop.com/travel/2015/05/travel-trends-for-adventure-seekers-its-about-experience/  © 2015 WTOP. All Rights Reserved.

**Note: I modified quotes and copy in order to clarify and/or add information to the story. I also added the Vietnam images and captions.