As wellness becomes more and more popular across all industries and businesses across the globe, I’ve noticed the topic around the notion of doing true wellness and making money from enhancing people’s overall wellbeing as being something unethical or dare I say even morally wrong.
And today, I’d like to be controversial again and call the big red BS card on that notion.
Doing wellness, that is truly transforming people’s lives by enhancing their overall wellbeing is NOT mutually exclusive to making money, specifically, insane amounts of money.
At the same time, there is also the argument in the industry that wellness should be made more accessible – that it should be democratised. And to clarify, this democratization is primarily driven by making wellness ‘cheaper’.
I think this argument stems from the image the luxury spa industry has built itself over the past few decades as being something that only the select few can afford today.
Hence, that is why wellness (which goes beyond spa) has become inaccessible.
Now, this is the argument I want us to be careful with because it is this mindset that will only further perpetuate the myth that wellness is not a substantial value and revenue contributor to a hotel’s overall profit and loss.
Because it is one thing saying that you acknowledge wellness is a significant value and revenue contributor, but it is a completely different ball game to genuinely believe it because you have actual evidence of it. In other words, wellness makes up more than the traditional 1-3% of total hotel revenue.
There will come a day when the whole world has milked the wellness boom as much as they can. And there will also come the day when hoteliers, not to mention other businesses in other industries, will be left to pick the pieces of the wellness offerings they created that might become obsolete because when they implemented these wellness offerings, they didn’t really know the wellness business very well.
And again, we’ll be known as the department that is important, has potential, but it really doesn’t generate important money.
That is what will make wellness less accessible. Price does not have anything to do with it.
In today’s episode, I’d like to share a clip of a LinkedIn Live session where I talked about the importance of making insane amounts of money with wellness, because when we do generate that level of revenue, we are actually reaching out to more lives and transforming even more lives – because we have the means to do so. Conversely, if we continue to downplay wellness, we’ll have commercially irresponsible businesses that are unable to have the impact they want, and as a result touch far fewer people and transform far fewer lives.
