Adjacent spaces

Wellness boost for UK

Wellness offerings could generate additional revenue of £21.1bn by 2023 to hospitality businesses in the UK, according to a study from Barclays.

The bank reported that 61% of businesses planned to invest more on health and wellbeing over the next three years.

In 2019, the global wellness industry was valued at $4.2tn, while the UK market for services related to wellness has meanwhile been estimated to be worth £12.4bn in 2020, with annual growth averaging nearly 4% per annum since 2015.

Barclay’s survey after the Covid-19 pandemic had taken hold found that consumers rated health and wellness as “extremely important”, up 7% on the results just a few months before, when the pandemic had not started yet in earnest. A significant minority of those surveyed reported that they had made, or planned to make, lifestyle changes linked to improved health and mental wellbeing during lockdown, including more regular exercise (28%) and dietary changes (23%).

Mike Saul, head of hospitality & leisure, Barclays Corporate Banking, said: “Responding to this uncertain environment requires great ingenuity and strong business strategy. Hospitality and leisure companies in the UK need to invest carefully and respond nimbly to consumer demand in order to future- proof their business. As wellness culture continues to grow, it represents great potential for the industry, offering the opportunity for new revenue streams, to strengthen customer satisfaction and loyalty and a place in a renewed world where holistic health includes each of us and our wider society.”

Earlier this year https://www.hospitalityinsights.com/content/wellness-and-virtuous-circle-profitabilityEmlyn Brown, VP, wellbeing, AccorHotels’ luxury & upper upscale brands, described to us the “virtuous circle of profitability” wellbeing could create in a hotel, commenting: “What’s the ROI of wellness and wellbeing? What we do know is that the wellness traveller spends far more on a property than a standard leisure traveller and that makes them a very important guest profile for us. Wellness is also highly attractive, it is a significant pull factor for a guest, it draws them into a property. When you are offering wellness as a chance to offer a personal experience for the guests, you have the chance to delight them - and create return visits.”

In line with trends across the sector, Brown had seen the impact of the pandemic as “a super accelerator for wellness, because what it’s saying to people is that you need to take into control your own personal health and wellbeing and then it’s a significant push factor from a mental health and overall stress and lifestyle point of view. The expectation of a guest will be even more focused on their health and wellbeing and I think that the three main areas on how to address that are through nutrition, at the centre of a menu, not just on the edge, then the exercise and movement experience not just in the gym, but into the room, into outside events, those type of things will be important and thirdly the mental health and wellbeing. There’s a natural decompress that will happen when a guests comes to a property.”

Despite Brown’s focus being primarily with the luxury sector, where he said, the group saw the majority of its opportunity, “on a broader note, the democratisation of wellness and wellbeing is vital. The younger generations - Millennials and Gen Z -  are significant proponents in terms of exercise and therefore the opportunity to broaden that across different brands subject to cost, is there. Access to things like great nutrition, access to sports facilities, is becoming more democratised, you’ll see that across our other brands going forward, getting into the midscale brands. Wellness is part of people’s everyday life and it needs to be matched and mirrored.

“We understand that at least three out of four of our guests are making a daily effort to improve their health and wellbeing and that needs to be nourished in terms of the opportunities they have on properties and in terms of the wellness spectrum. What we want to achieve is to be an industry leader in wellness and wellbeing within luxury hospitality and that’s why our department was formed and what it’s focused on.

“Wellness has been around for 2,000 years, it’s not a new element. What we do see is that wellness is an expectation and not a USP, it’s truly in the mainstream, it’s changed the way our guests think, how they consume. Our guests are more sophisticated in terms of their understanding of wellness and wellbeing and what it looks like. It’s now moved into F&B and into room design.”

 

Insight: The pandemic, as we never tire of hearing, has accelerated trends and made the likely ever more so. It can come as no great shock that with news about ventilators, vaccines and viruses dominating the news, people are looking to their health and general wellbeing and focusing on it. Who did not this summer see a break as critical, not just nice to have?

The danger with wellness, as with the push towards greater sustainability, is one of dripping a mere veneer of wellness onto an existing product or property, without doing it property - wellwashing. So a green smoothie with your all-you-can-eat fry up.

As the report notes, the guest’s purse is under pressure at the moment. No-one wants to come back from a break having ingested a lot of kale but ramped up the cholesterol.