When June came around last year, Sarah Wong was at the end of her rope. As a social media marketer, much of her day is spent on the phone keeping up with local news and events, and she’d hit a breaking point. “It’s just very overwhelming to be bombarded with news every day,” the 28-year-old tells me.
Wong and her husband, a software engineer, typically travel every couple of months from their hometown of Austin, spending a few days exploring cities like Las Vegas, San Diego, and Martha’s Vineyard. But her regular vacation wasn’t going to cut it this time. Wong decided to try a wellness retreat, hoping it would help her unplug and reset her nervous system. She booked a four-night stay at the nearby Miraval Austin Resort and Spa with her husband. “I think anyone who works in social media needs a reset where they don’t have to be online,” she says.
At the property, staff valeted her minivan and took her bags. Wong and her husband were given the choice between a backpack or tote bag containing a branded water bottle and a “cellphone sleeping bag” to hold their phones during their stay. (Miraval enforces a strict no-phone policy except in designated areas). “It’s very ‘White Lotus‘,” she tells me.
Between rope courses, sound bowl healing, and yoga, she and her husband would snag lunch from the build-your-own salad bar or off a menu where “each dish is designed with wellness in mind,” per the resort, and lounge by the pool. She tried yoga nidra, a form of meditation that promotes relaxation, which she describes as feeling like “you woke up from the best nap of your life.”
“It feels like an adult summer camp,” she says.
Since the retreat, Wong says she is able to step away from her phone more easily and spends more time outside. "I've been trying to use our patio to just take in the fresh air, look at trees, look at the sky." She and her husband are planning to go again this year. "We want to hit all three properties," she tells me.
Ever since pandemic-era travel restrictions subsided, travel has boomed. More recently, "rest and relaxation" has jumped ahead of having "a fun time" as the main motivation for leisure travel, according to a nationally representative 2024 survey of 1,000 US travelers from the market research firm Longwoods International. A Deloitte survey produced similar results. More people are feeling overwhelmed, burned out, or just want to focus their PTO time on improving their health. A 2023 American Express travel survey found that 73% of respondents were planning vacations around improving their physical and emotional health, with millennials and Gen Z prioritizing wellness travel at a higher rate than older generations.
A growing obsession with wellness paired with mounting uncertainty about daily life is driving demand for relaxation. Welcome to the age of the self-care-cation.
As recently as five years ago, wellness could be classified as a "niche segment" in travel, associated primarily with weekend spa breaks and hippie yoga retreats. But since COVID, people have begun to get serious about their health. McKinsey estimated the US market for wellness — which it defined as including better health, fitness, sleep, mindfulness, appearance, and nutrition — is up almost 7% since 2022, reaching $480 billion. Nearly 60% of respondents to the McKinsey survey said they valued wellness more in 2024 than the previous year. Meanwhile, the number of health and wellness podcasts has grown by 50% in the past five years, Nielsen found, while self-help books are one of the fastest-growing nonfiction genres. Younger generations are now shunning alcohol and driving a boom in bougie wellness clubs.
"The tourism market looks a little bit at what's happening in people's leisure time, looks at the consumer trends and thinks, 'How can we capitalize on this?'" says Melanie Kay Smith, an associate professor of tourism management at Budapest Business University.
I get home and feel filled up and energized by the experience rather than needing another holiday to get over the holiday.
Hilton announced in January that it now offers guided meditations, sleep stories, and mindfulness exercises from the mental-health wellness company Calm via their hotel room TVs. It also partnered with Peloton to offer workouts from room TVs. Other brands are investing in new wellness-focused resorts, such as Hyatt's new "art and wellness house" in Panama that's set to open soon. Accor Group plans to open 18 new luxury hotels this year and touts the wellness amenities in five of them. It's also opening a wellness-focused resort in the Caribbean later this year.
The drive for wellness isn't coming out of nowhere. In 2023, nearly half of Americans reported they frequently experienced stress, more than any other point since Gallup started tracking it in 1994. People are also becoming more anxious: In 2024, 43% of adults surveyed by the American Psychiatric Association said they felt more anxious than they had the previous year. "As life speeds up, maybe our vacations need to be slower to compensate," says Smith.
Hotels, resorts, and retreats are stepping in to meet the need for a little TLC. In 2024, Miraval Resorts said it saw a nearly 80% increase in demand for stress management workshops over the previous year. It also said that group arrivals have increased 157% since 2021. "I think the luxury consumer realizes that instead of acquiring things, acquiring experiences is much more rich," says Dina Niekamp, the associate vice president of sales, marketing, and brand for Miraval.
Ella Dixon-Nuttall, a 28-year-old yoga teacher from London, was tired of taking trips that revolved around beach clubs and drinking. So last June, she went on her first yoga retreat in Sicily with a friend. It cost £1,600, or just over $2,000, for the week and included accommodations, three meals a day, and yoga classes in the morning and evening. "You got the benefit of an all-inclusive but then you also have the movement and wellness aspect," she tells me. "I get home and feel filled up and energized by the experience rather than needing another holiday to get over the holiday."
Dixon-Nuttall enjoyed it so much that in February she went on her second retreat, this time with her mother. In March, she went on a third retreat in France. "It's such a wonderful way to travel," she says. "I'm now a retreat convert to the point where if I want to go somewhere I'll look if there's a retreat there." She is looking to book another in India later this year.
'I need you to put this in the budget for the next 20 years.'
Lili Paxton's mother is a similar convert. Growing up, Paxton recalls family ski trips and girls getaways to Palm Springs. But at the end of 2022, Paxton and her mother were looking to book a more relaxing trip. They ended up planning a weeklong stay at Rancho La Puerta, a wellness resort and spa just over the San Diego border in Baja California, Mexico, after a family member recommended it. Weeklong rates for one person start at $5,650. Neither Paxton nor her mother had done anything like it before.
Each day hikes were offered at 5:30 a.m. Classes were available each hour for everything from Pilates to pickleball. Paxton's mother tried Watsu — a type of water therapy that uses massage, stretching, and acupressure — for the first time. "She said it was the most spiritual experience," Paxton says. "She said that she saw my dead father under the water."
When Paxton wasn't hiking or exercising, she was at the spa or relaxing by the pool. "The whole time I was just really happy," she says. "It felt like an escape from reality."
Her mother left the trip transformed. "My mom is committed to going every year until she dies," says Paxton. "She even talked to her financial planner and was like, 'I need you to put this in the budget for the next 20 years.'" They spent another week at the retreat this past Christmas.
While many people are happy to pay a premium for a chance to indulge in simple things like walking in nature or taking a deep breath, for others, wellness is becoming increasingly high-tech. Since 2008, the wellness resort Sha has been at the forefront of holistic health, offering around 1,000 different treatments in nearly 40 different medical and health specialties at its locations in Spain and Mexico. Stays at the resort start at 550 euros a night, or roughly $600, while specialized four-day programs start at 2,500 euros, or about $2,700, with add-ons for treatments focused on sexual well-being, sleep recovery, stress management, gut health, quitting smoking, and more.
The "Leader's Performance" program, for example, starts with an advanced preventive diagnosis that tests body composition, cognitive abilities, and advanced glycation end-product accumulation — compounds that are linked with aging. Guests can also participate in clinical analyses, such as an oxidative stress test and a tailored meal plan with nutritional monitoring.
Almost every type of treatment imaginable is available at Sha: stem cell treatment, advanced plasma renewal, hormone replacement therapy, sleep diagnosis. All guests receive an alkalizing diet tailored to their individual nutritional needs. "Even if you go to see all these different experts in the city, first, it will take you months to see them all, then there will be no coordination between them," Alejandro Bataller, Sha's vice president, says. "We're probably the most comprehensive."
While Sha appeals to a range of health-conscious consumers, Bataller has noticed an increase over the past two or three years in customers he calls "biohackers." These are people who already have a longevity doctor, nutritionist, and functional medicine doctor on speed dial, who take 40-plus supplements a day and invest in the latest high-tech treatments. "They don't want a standard program," he says. "They come to Sha because they know that Sha is always cutting edge."
It's looking as if you've funneled thousands and tens of thousands of dollars into your face and body. That's not health; that's products, that's procedures.
Bataller describes wellness as not just being healthy, but as an "active, ongoing pursuit" that focuses on improving yourself. "You can see someone with the best car, the best watch, the best suit," he says. "But if he doesn't look healthy, that doesn't seem like luxury."
While there's research backing up some of these treatments, Jessica DeFino, a beauty reporter and culture critic, questions how much is driven by health and how much is simply a medicalized beauty standard. "A better way to think about how we see looking healthy today is actually looking wealthy," she says. "It's looking as if you've funneled thousands and tens of thousands of dollars into your face and body. That's not health; that's products, that's procedures."
Of course, products and procedures are all the rage right now as people look for alternative approaches to well-being. "Our culture is largely unwell," DeFino explains. Only 36% of Americans have at least "quite a lot" of trust in the medical system, a 2024 Gallup survey found, and studies show that Americans are sicker than people in many parts of the world. Only about half of Americans focus on eating healthy and exercising, despite diet and physical inactivity being leading contributors to chronic disease. Wellness gurus have stepped in to fill the gap left by a flagging healthcare system. Across social platforms, they document macros consumed and hours spent in REM, while touting the benefits of cryotherapy, red-light therapy, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. "The draw of wellness for the average person is it offers an individualized solution to a collective issue," DeFino says, adding: "A lot of this is an attempt to intellectualize these arbitrary, oppressive beauty standards and make them seem like smart investments."
That doesn't mean the pursuit of chilling out isn't worth it. A 2023 study that reviewed 68 articles from 2002 to 2022 found that wellness tourism — defined as any tourism activities pursued with the goal of maintaining or improving health — could offer both psychological and quality-of-life benefits. However, these benefits vary from person to person, making it challenging to measure them.
It's easy to get carried away thinking we all need cutting-edge treatments to get by. "It's great to step out of your everyday life and relax," says DeFino. "Collectively, we also have to be focusing on how we create lives that we don't need to step out of all of the time."
Eve Upton-Clark is a features writer covering culture and society.