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Hotel longevity and human longevity both require a deepening of wellness. For hotels, this means more amenities and experiences; for guests and consumers, more incorporation of wellness practices in their daily habits — as inspired by hotels.
While the leisure side of hotel travel has embraced this path, business travel is lagging. But there is an area where they intersect for a very lucrative growth opportunity for hotel brands: corporate retreats. To get a sense of what’s possible, we sat down with Ersin Pamuksuzer, founder of TheLifeCo, which has operated corporate wellness retreats out of its Turkey resorts for over two decades as complementary to its core business of wellness detox-based leisure stays.
Importantly, let’s first look at the nature of office work as we all get back on the hamster wheel from the pandemic. Many of us are overworked, stressed out and demoralized. Churn is a concern for many knowledge-worker-centric corporations, who are now looking to professionals to set up mental health and employee well-being policies.
To break this down, here are the risks of not taking employee well-being seriously:
- Low job-site productivity and poor team communications.
- More sick days taken and more absenteeism.
- Employee burnout and increased turnover.
- Managers leaving suddenly for no obvious reason, creating leadership gaps.
- Decreased intrapreneurship and team empowerment.
In short, all this amounts to more costs and operational inefficiencies. In other words, the need has never been greater for a way to bring teams together in a great setting and combine some strategic planning sessions with wellness activities.
Not convinced? Based on what we examined with Pamuksuzer and the programming he’s set up at TheLifeCo, here are some key benefits that any hotel (urban or rural) can realize:
- Increased per-guest spend at each corporate retreat.
- Ability to upgrade or upsell room types.
- Hotel brand differentiation.
- More off-peak revenues and occupancies.
- Ability to co-brand wellness programming at other venues.
- More positive word of mouth for the brand.
All that glitters isn’t gold, though. Getting started demands a narrow focus of target buyers. In the early 2000s, TheLifeCo started small with one-day seminars at corporate offices in Istanbul using its internal team, with each centered around meditation classes followed by a strategy workshop. Often this involved carving out a dedicated space within the office or renting a nearby conference center as well as training a “wellness champion” within each client company who would help ensure event success.
Only after some initial successes did TheLifeCo start to offer multi-night offsite retreat packages at one of its properties — in Turkey, these being situated in Bodrum and Antalya. Pamuksuzer also invited HR directors down to a resort to personally experience the amenities as a form of targeted familiarization trip.
Leveraging its detox-based core business, TheLifeCo deploys a variety of its FIT-focused services for its corporate wellness retreats including healthy food and beverage, supervised fasting, IV supplement administration and flexibility classes, which are then mixed in with continuing professional development sessions on efficient communications, attaining a better work-life balance, finding one’s job purpose and passion negotiations.
To conclude, a hotelier or owner might ponder, “Seems like a lot of work, but where’s the profit?” As Pamuksuzer showed us, with these wellness itineraries in place, a corporate retreat quote can often double in price charged to the client. And they often go for it without haggling because the value of wellness justifies such a cost increase.
Adam and Larry Mogelonsky are partners of Hotel Mogel Consulting Ltd., a Toronto-based consulting practice. Larry focuses on asset management, sales and operations while Adam specializes in hotel technology and marketing.
The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.
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