How Can Interconnectivity and Wellness Make Hotels Stand Out from the Rest?

Travel & Hospitality Tech Outlook | Tuesday, February 11, 2020

The pursuit of wellbeing is about much more than receiving a pampering; travelers are thirsty for wellness and are no longer satisfied with the standard-issue hotel gym and generic spa services.

FREMONT, CA: Today's booming wellness industry has incredible potential, beyond the traditional amenities, guest's showing distinctive touches like a connection to the wellness features, local culture, a place to connect with others, and private spaces. Incorporating wellness design principals and programming into hotel spaces separates the properties apart from their competition. The integration of wellness design and system considerations outside a property's spa facilities and in the guestroom and communal spaces is a dynamic way to interact with the guests that the hotel cares about. Here are some areas where hotels can extract wellness and interconnectedness via design.

Fitness Centers

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Fitness centers are an integral element of hotels and should be on the ground floor so that they can instantly connect with the guests to a culture of wellness. The hospitality companies are collaborating localized programming, sustainable design elements and partnerships with the leaders in health and wellbeing to ensure brand appeal. The design of the future hotel gym will be peaceful paint colors, natural lighting, calming acoustics, relaxation nooks, complex air purification systems, and many more to incorporate every element of wellness into it. Taking inspiration from the current wellness trend, hotels are building and designing keeping human health as its priority, and meeting an entirely new set of standards.

Making Outdoors Indoor

The most popular design feature is blurring the lines between the inside and the outside. For instance, using bifold doors, outdoor bathrooms, vertical gardens or living walls, and maintaining the same floor level between indoor and outdoor spaces. Additionally, nature-themed colors are in the market, as it satisfies the urge to reconnect with nature in today's society.

Co-working Spaces

Some of the features of a co-working space designing is specialized lighting, that supports the body's circadian rhythms, living walls that can clean the air, high-quality air filtration systems, a yoga room with showers, music, and a lot of soft materials like area rugs, window treatments, and wall coverings to cover the unwanted sounds.

Creating a Gathering Space

With the rise of this new wellness economy, the hotels are transitioning from the hotel bar as the primary hub or a gathering place towards warm and inviting spaces for collective gatherings. For example, hotels are adding in-house yoga studio, outdoor fire pits, juice-bars, with integrated programming like lectures or guided meditations. Communal harvest tables are placed aside to provide spaces for the guests to share meals, and spa amenities like a steam room and relaxation lounges help the guests to wind down. All of these areas are for the guests to come together and connect.

Controlling Sounds

The hospitality sector can and should leverage music to evoke feelings and trigger strong memories, whether at a soothing retreat or in a hip and happening urban venue. They should take into consideration sounds from music as well; similarly, even a lawnmower can bring back memories from long ago, when even more soothing sounds can be used to mask aggravating background noises.

Reconsidering the Lobby

The modern guests prefer to connect with what is unique about the locale and get a distinctive vibe in place of a prototypical design. The lobby has to give more intimate and should have a local flavor to attract the guests in. The front desk should be in the corner rather than in the center to make it feel less like a hotel and more connected with the local. The lobby's today is no more a place for them to linger; it's a space where the interconnectedness can be established. Mixing work, entertainment, and socializing in one space is becoming the new rule.

Wellness to be the most important element of a hotel's offerings impacts more than just the guest experience. It can create a positive impact on property's occupancy, augment the bottom line by increasing the average guest spending, and with the help of complex design enhancements, enables the hoteliers to create an additional tier of guestroom suites.

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