At the end of 2024, I wrote an article for Spa Business describing it as The Year of Wellness in hospitality. Never before had we seen such a consensus on the importance of wellness among hotels and resorts.
If 2024 was The Year of Wellness, then we must designate 2025 as The Year of Longevity. As owners, investors and brands strive to create the latest, most cutting-edge wellness offerings, ‘longevity’ has bubbled to the surface as the quintessential driver for wellness innovation.
In 30 years of sitting at the intersection of wellness and hospitality, watching trends rise and fall, I’ve never seen a topic spread so quickly and capture the imagination (and investment dollars) of the industry with such fervour.
It may simply be timing. We came out of the pandemic with not only a renewed interest and respect for wellness, but a commitment to rebuild the luxury travel segment and deliver more meaningful experiences. Hospitality investors looked to technology for new solutions to deliver enhanced wellness experiences for guests. What they found was a perfect storm:
• Better diagnostic tools that allow us to predict future health outcomes
• New devices and equipment that promise to impact health at a cellular level
• A rising frustration with the ‘illness model’ of traditional healthcare
Longevity promises to keep us out of the healthcare system altogether by helping to better evaluate the inherent risks in our current lifestyle and genetic profile and then prescribing the personalised interventions to build health in a sustainable and future-oriented way. It’s a compelling vision that’s captured the attention of investors, journalists and affluent consumers.
But not everyone’s convinced. Unlike 2024, when the industry found a consensus around wellness, 2025 was a year of debate. On one side, there are people who believe that longevity is the future and that hospitality will be the industry to usher it in. On the other side, there are people who feel it’s a media-hyped bubble that’s driving speculative investment with no possibility of returns. So who’s right? The most likely scenario is that there’s truth on both sides.
On one hand, the hospitality industry has struggled to market and sell wellness. Longevity is even harder to sell. Hospitality brands investing in expensive equipment and high labour-cost medical oversight for their longevity offerings will struggle to make a profit if they don’t find new ways of connecting with their wellness customers. And the pace of innovation in this area is so fast that the expensive equipment being installed today will likely be approaching obsolescence long before a profitable ROI is achieved.
On the other hand, the new discussion around longevity is planting a seed in consumers’ minds and changing their expectations for how health should be managed. Hospitality brands will give consumers an opportunity to try new tools, and some of those tools will stick and become a larger part of a healthy lifestyle. Consumers will come to expect more scientific approaches to wellness with more evidence-based methodologies and a more forward-reaching time perspective.
Both consumers and brands will need to become more future-oriented and consider the impact of their experiences not only on health, but also on healthspan.
The discussion around longevity in 2025 culminated at the Global Wellness Summit in Dubai. At the summit, event chair and CEO, Susie Ellis reminded us that ‘spa’ and ‘wellness’ also went through a period of upheaval before they were accepted and ultimately embedded in hospitality. The overwhelming rise of wellness in hospitality has been more than a decade in the making. Longevity may be on a similar journey, but if its rapid rise in 2025 is any indication, the ideas will be tested and proven (or not) at breakneck speed.
● Spa Business columnist, Jeremy McCarthy, has worked at the intersection of wellness and hospitality for over 30 years for brands such as Four Seasons, KSL Resorts, Starwood Hotels and most recently, Mandarin Oriental. Contact him with your views on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/jeremymcc
