How fitness went from holiday activity to ultimate ‘destination’
Boom in wellness tourism sees travellers embrace yoga meditation festivals, health-relaxation cruises and celebrity-trainer workouts in exotic locations
It is one thing when hotels open fitness centres, but quite another when fitness centres open hotels.
Luxe gym Equinox is opening a hotel in New York’s new Hudson Yards neighbourhood next year in a move that embodies the evolution of wellness travel.
Most hotels have increased fitness options – you can book rooms with stationary bikes and rent workout clothes – but wellness travel has become much more than just keeping fit while on the road. Increasingly it has become the point of the journey. And it is bringing in lots of money.
Whether it is foraging for your own medicinal herbs in Peru, cycling across the California coastline or spending several thousand dollars to workout alongside celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson in Aspen, Colorado, wellness tourists made 691 million trips in 2015, according to the Global Wellness Institute.
In the past, wellness holidays straddled between starvation-style boot camps or relaxing spa weekends to detox from an unhealthy lifestyle.
[Fitness has] gone from being an activity to now [where] it’s a destination – it’s a purpose.
However, as self-care has evolved into a daily goal, it has found an obvious match in travel. International and domestic wellness tourism brought in US$563 billion in 2015 – up from US$489 billion in 2013, according to the Global Wellness Institute.
Wellness travel is expected to grow to US$808 billion by 2020.