TREND: URBAN BATHHOUSES HEATING UP Affordable, social, and accessible wellness is coming to a city near you For centuries, the cleansing and healing power of water and heat has been harnessed to bring city dwellers together in the common pursuit of cleanliness. Early public bathhouses were fueled by mineral-rich waters warmed from the earth’s core, which bubbled up and not only cleansed, but also worked…
2022 Trend Forecasts Agree: Wellness Is Officially Overtaking Travel Around the New Year, the trend reports start rolling out, and what’s striking is that most of the mainstream travel trend forecasts agree that wellness travel will be a major and growing trend in 2022. As the analysts from the international advertising agency, TBWA’s trends division, Backslash, neatly put it: “Wellness has officially taken over travel.”…
Wellness vacations go beyond massages and diet tips during the pandemic–The New Yorker With the pandemic lingering into its third year, this article interviews hospitality leaders on how the crisis has dramatically accelerated the importance of wellness in travel. Travel is now about healing from physical and mental stress, and people want programming that provides some new answers about how to feel better. Hotels/resorts are…
Tel Aviv and Israel Make Headlines for Innovation, Technology and Wellness Tourism Bloomberg ranks Israel #1 for research and development intensity and research concentration. Tel Aviv boasts more startups than any location after Silicon Valley (and more startups per capita than anywhere in the world). The vibrant city of Tel Aviv is also becoming ground zero for health and wellness innovation, technology, and investment—making it…
Medicine’s Wellness Conundrum–The New Yorker This article discusses the rising commingling of medicine and wellness at hospitals–and how patients and doctors don’t always see eye to eye. Patients demand alternative therapies–touch treatments, mental support and stress-reduction, nutritional advice, etc.–that address them in a more human, holistic way. Far more hospitals now have a wellness facility of some kind, and cancer patients in particular are demanding services that fall under the aegis of wellness. For some physicians, offering…
TREND: Healthcare Meets Wellness–Recent Signs of a New Convergence Our 2021 trend “The Self-Care Renaissance” argued that a new era was upon us–one where the complementary yet often combative relationship between medicine and wellness gets rethought, leading to new conversations and convergences between these two worlds. The pandemic was the shock that has forced healthcare to finally focus on prevention and more holistic models of medicine. At the same time, wellness companies are increasingly forced…
What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?–The New York Times COVID-19’s strangest symptom–losing one’s sense of smell–has opened up new doors to understanding our most neglected sense. If you want to understand our long cultural history that has denigrated the importance of the sense of smell and the mounting research on how smell is a “startling” and complex superpower–read this article! It covers so much:…
TREND: A Wave of Scent Innovation Fueled by the Pandemic Fragrance is being developed and applied for wellbeing in dramatically new ways Back in 2019, one of our key trends was how fragrance was getting a wellness makeover. With a new understanding of scent’s role in our mental and physical health, there was a new wave of functional fragrances and scent-for-wellbeing applications starting to rise. The pandemic has kicked…
The New Overtourism Debate–Travel Weekly A great overview of how global travel destinations are creating new plans to fight overtourism–whether by ending mass-market marketing campaigns, curtailing short-terms rentals, or by banning cruise ships. The new tourism vision revolves around bringing in high-yield tourists, but the challenge will be how to not erect new travel barriers for the non-rich while keeping the numbers and destruction down. Should Some of the World’s Endangered Places Be Off-limits to Tourists?–National Geographic An in-depth piece with tourism experts explaining the different models now being launched to address overtourism. National parks, overrun by pandemic travelers seeking remote nature, are…
TREND: Fighting Overtourism Moves from Talk to Real Action The experiments–from banning short-term rentals to nixing cruise ships to charging fees to enter a place to marketing only to “conscious travelers”– are really heating up In our 2021 trend “The Year of the Travel Reset,” author and New York Times columnist, Elaine Glusac, predicted that this long travel pause caused by the pandemic would give everyone—consumers and travel suppliers—a rare, crucial opportunity to think of the ways that travel could be…
