Longevity travel trend: Why wellness tourists are chasing data-led retreats. Photo / Capella
Where the multibillion-dollar wellness industry goes, wellness travel inevitably soon follows. So, when longevity became the “it thing” of the wellness world, it’s no surprise that hotels, retreats and destinations took note, writes Sarah Pollok.
Feeling “reborn” is often reserved for monumental moments of spiritual revelation or physical upheaval. Things with substance. Yet, when my eyemask was removed after a massage at Capella Sydney’s Auriga Spa, there was no other word for it.
Warm, soft and slightly sticky, I was something David Attenborough would have suitably narrated as I squinted at the lights, adjusting to my surroundings.
Considering Capella Sydney’s “New Moon Renewal and Reflection” is described as providing “new beginnings”, it’s little surprise one feels a bodily ease they haven’t experienced since childhood.
However, this is the tip of the rose quartz iceberg when it comes to what the hotel and the wider wellness tourism industry are starting to offer travellers.
The next day, a short bike ride gets me to the leafy harbourside suburb of Double Bay, for a very different kind of wellness appointment.
There are no plush bathrobes or candles at the Longevity Medicine Institute (LMI). Instead of massage tables or ambient playlists, clients have full-body MRI machines and the whirr of a stationary bike as they test their VO2 max.
They also have the expertise of Dr Adam Brown, who left his decade-long career in general practice and put his 20 years of medical experience into founding LMI in 2024 with his co-founder and wife, Baiba Brown. As of March, it’s also an official partner of Capella Sydney.
As part of this, guests receive room rate benefits, and all appointments, treatments and transport are coordinated via the hotel.
Brown said the partnership simply formalises what was already happening organically: hotel guests seeking a more comprehensive wellness experience, or clients travelling to Sydney who needed a place to stay. More than half of LMI’s clients travel interstate or overseas, Brown estimates, mainly from Brisbane, Perth and, increasingly, New Zealand.
The previous week, a couple had flown from Auckland to Sydney to meet the team before committing to membership. It’s common, Brown said, given the investment sits in the thousands of dollars.
“They love the Capella connection, and they normally stay in Capella when they come,” he said of the couple.
A love of travel isn’t the only similarity between those you’ll find in LMI’s clinic or Capella’s Spa. They both tend to be high-status individuals with the money and motivation to invest extensively in their wellbeing.
The archetypal client would be an executive, CEO or high performer, aged 30-65, Brown said, adding that roughly 70% of clients were men. Some of them are health experts wanting to further optimise, some have neglected their health in pursuit of career and some have been coaxed in by their wives. All of them want rigorous, evidence-based results and have little time to spend on testing.
“We’re trying to smash it off in one day,” Brown says of the approach. “We collect as many biomarkers as we can, we’ve got all of that information and then we do the Zoom, we follow up with them.”
On the day itself, patients can spend four to seven hours at the clinic working through what Brown calls “the eight pillars of longevity” that include hormonal balance, nutrition and gut microbiome, physical resilience and sleep physiology.
There is a carotid artery ultrasound to assess stroke risk and VO2 max test, an EEG brain function assessment and VR cognitive test. “Brain health is kind of becoming the hot topic at the moment,” Brown said, adding that we would see it trending in wellness soon.
“It’s endless,” Baiba says of the ways people can improve their health.
If their partnership and plans to expand are any indication, there is seemingly endless desire for wellness from travellers.
Capella isn’t the first hotel to start dedicating serious square-metreage or money to wellness. The Emory London’s Surenne Spa takes up four floors, the Gold Coast’s Mondrian has recently launched a dynamic bio-wellness retreat, while in January, Novotel launched Longevity Everyday, a campaign across more than 600 hotels that will update and rebrand guest experiences to align with the wellbeing trend.
“Longevity is a megatrend reshaping our world and our industry – a high-growth market expected to be worth trillions to the travel and leisure sector by 2030,” said Jean-Yves Minet, Novotel global brand president.
Wellness in general continues to be a force driving tourism, according to experts at a panel at TravMedia IMM in Sydney this February.
“We’re seeing more tourism experiences that are focused on wellness,” said one panellist, Sarah Kingston Clark, CEO of Tourism Tasmania. “We’re also seeing that category really blend, so it’s no longer a niche category,” she said.
As with most things, the supply is simply a response to demand, as wellness goes from niche pursuit to mainstream expectation.
“I think that’s why we’re seeing a big boom, is people want wellness as a baseline now when they travel,” said Camilla Thompson, author and founder, BiohackMe.
“People don’t want a holiday after a holiday anymore,” she said. “I think people now need that recovery. They need that recalibration and that reset, and they need to go and recharge.”
The other change? A growing desire for data-driven, biomedical approaches in addition to intuitive, eastern ones. Something Janine Cottle, founder of Escape Haven, has seen across the hundreds of guests who visit each year.
“It’s really interesting to look at how trends have shifted,” she said, describing how Australian search data demonstrates a radical change post-pandemic.
“They’re not looking for activity-based holidays. They’re looking for outcome-based holidays because they’re a lot more savvy,” she said.
This shift wasn’t without critique among the panel, something the Global Wellness Summit has titled “over-optimisation backlash”, which advises caution around constant health tracking.
“We’re all so obsessed with tracking this and measuring that, and we’ve almost forgotten our own intuition,” said panel host and Spa & Wellness founder, Kris Abbey.
“Evidence and data shouldn’t replace the magic,” agreed Nick Arana, CEO of Subtle Energies, which has built clinical wellness programmes with properties such as Mandarin Oriental for 30 years.
Despite working in the biohacking space, Thompson said people can take it too far and lose the joy and intuition.
“It’s just there to support the experience, but not be the experience.”
As for the future of wellness travel, Cottle said her vision was to see the category move beyond being a burnout fix.
“In five years’ time, what I’d love to see from a wellness travel perspective is that we’re no longer the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff,” she said, with more focus on prevention and less on repair; the same vision that led Brown to leave general practice and start LMI.
“General practice has its place, but I’ve done that 10-minute appointment thing, and it’s still kind of general practice what you do here, just, you feel like you don’t have 15-minute appointments, but four to six hours with the patients.”
Whether it’s a longevity clinic collaboration or a state-of-the-art gym, hotels and destinations staying ahead of the curve understand that, for a growing number of travellers, luxury isn’t just about tasting menus or experiencing culture, but arriving home feeling better than when you left.
New Zealand Herald Travel was hosted by TravMedia and Capella Sydney.