Considering Capella Sydney’s “New Moon Renewal and Attitude” is described as offering a “fresh start”, it’s no wonder one feels a sense of well-being in the body that they haven’t experienced since childhood.
However, this is the tip of the rose quartz iceberg when it comes to what the hotel and health tourism industry is starting to offer to guests.
The next day, a short bike ride takes me to the leafy town of Double Bay, for a very different health session.
There are no fluffy baths or candles at the Longevity Medicine Institute (LMI). Instead of massage tables or ambient playlists, clients have full-body MRI machines and a stationary bike to test their VO2 max.
They also have the experience of Dr. Adam Brown, who left his career of ten years in general and used his 20 years of experience to establish LMI in 2024 with co-founder and his wife, Baiba Brown. Since March, it is also the official partner of Capella Sydney.
As part of this, guests receive room rate benefits, and all appointments, treatments and transportation are coordinated through the hotel.
Brown says the partnership builds on what was already happening naturally: hotel guests looking for holistic wellness, or customers visiting Sydney needing a place to stay. More than half of LMI’s customers travel interstate or overseas, Brown estimates, mainly from Brisbane, Perth and, most notably, New Zealand.
Last week, a couple had flown from Auckland to Sydney to meet the group before committing to membership. That’s normal, Brown said, given the investment sits in the thousands of dollars.
“They love the Capella connection, and they usually stay at Capella when they come,” he said of the couple.
A love of travel isn’t the only thing you’ll find in the LMI clinic or the Capella Spa. Both are elites with the money and motivation to invest heavily in their interests.
A typical customer could be a manager, CEO or executive, aged 30-65, Brown said, adding that about 70% of customers were men. Some of them are health professionals who want to continue their health, others have neglected their health in pursuit of work while others have been cheated by their wives. They all want strong, evidence-based results and have little time to spend on testing.
“We try to break it down in one day,” Brown says of the process. “We collect as many biomarkers as we can, we have all that information and we do Zoom, we track it.”
On the day itself, patients can spend four to seven hours in the clinic working on what Brown calls the “eight pillars of longevity” which include hormone balance, nutrition and gut microbiome, physical fitness and sleep physiology.
There is a carotid artery ultrasound to assess the risk of stroke and a VO2 max test, an EEG brain activity test and a VR cognitive test. “Brain health is kind of a hot topic right now,” Brown said, adding that we’ll see it get better soon.
“It never ends,” Baiba says about the ways in which people can improve their lives.
If their collaboration and expansion plans are any indication, there seems to be a never-ending appetite for wellness from travelers.
Health is no longer a tourist destination
Capella is not the first hotel to start donating square footage or money to wellness. Emory London’s Surenne Spa spans four floors, the Gold Coast’s Mondrian has just launched an intensive wellness initiative, while in January, Novotel launched Longevity Everyday, a campaign for more than 600 hotels that will renovate and renew guest experiences to adapt to health.
“Longevity is a megatrend that is changing our world and our industry – a growing market expected to be worth trillions in the travel and leisure sector by 2030,” said Jean-Yves Minet, global president of Novotel.
General health continues to influence tourism, according to experts at the TravMedia IMM panel in Sydney in February.
“We’re seeing more and more wellness-focused tourism experiences,” said one expert, Sarah Kingston Clark, CEO of Tourism Tasmania. “We’re also seeing that group merge, so it’s no longer a niche group,” he said.
As with most things, supply is simply a response to demand, as health moves from a niche pursuit to a mainstream expectation.
“I think that’s why we’re seeing so much growth, is that people want health as a base when they travel,” said Camilla Thompson, author and founder, BiohackMe.
He said: “People don’t want holiday after holiday anymore. I think now people need to recover.
Another change? The increasing desire for data-driven, biomedical methods in addition to the obvious, is eastern. Something Janine Cottle, the founder of Escape Haven, sees hundreds of visitors every year.
“It’s very interesting to see how things have changed,” he said, explaining how Australian search data shows a significant change after the pandemic.
“They don’t want work-based holidays,” he said.
The change was not without criticism among the panel, something the Global Wellness Summit called “over-optimization backlash”, which advises caution about regular health tracking.
“We’ve all been so busy tracking this and measuring this that we’ve forgotten about our feelings,” said group host and founder of Spa & Wellness, Kris Abbey.
“Evidence and facts should never replace magic,” says Nick Arana, CEO of Subtle Energies, who has created medical wellness programs at properties like the Mandarin Oriental for 30 years.
Although he works in the field of biohacking, Thompson said people can take it too far and lose their joy and intuition.
“It’s just there to support the experience, not be the experience.”
As for the future of health travel, Cottle said his vision was to see the team move forward to fix fatigue.
“In five years’ time, what I would like to see from a health travel perspective is that we are no longer an ambulance at the bottom of the rock,” he said, focusing more on prevention and reducing repairs; the same vision that led Brown to abandon general practice and start LMI.
“General practice has its place, but I did that 10-minute thing, and it’s still the general approach to what you do here, only, you feel like you don’t have 15 minutes, but four to six hours with patients.”
Whether it’s a long-term clinical partnership or a top-notch workout, hotels and destinations stay ahead of the curve understanding that, for a growing number of travelers, luxury isn’t just about experiencing opportunities or experiencing culture, but coming home feeling better than when you left.
New Zealand Herald Travel was hosted by TravMedia and Capella Sydney.
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