Set on a serene campus featuring adobe walls and eucalyptus trees, Canyon Ranch Tucson offers a unique travel experience. This Arizona property is credited with creating the wellness resort concept. But one of its latest trendy offerings isn’t focused on the top-notch spa, excellent cuisine, or hiking trails that tend to get raves from well-heeled travelers.
Rather, it’s a multiday immersion trip focused on the experience of, well, doing nothing at all. The Mastering Sleep Retreat, which started in 2022, offers guests the chance to attend lectures about how supplements and exercise impact their rest; get sleep assessments and overnight monitoring from board-certified physicians, registered nurses, and dietitians; and learn science-backed strategies to overcome stress and strain and get on a better sleep cycle at home.
The experience is one example of the current boom in sleep tourism, which has been fully embraced by luxury boutiques and industry giants including Hilton and Marriott. Overlapping with the ever-expanding wellness industry, sleep tourism is a $640 billion global market that may top $1 billion by 2028, according to HTF Market Intelligence estimates.
Park Hyatt properties offer sleep suites furnished with Bryte smart beds, whose AI-powered mattresses purport to “unlock restorative sleep.” At Kamalaya Koh Samui resort in Thailand, guests can indulge in traditional Chinese medicine as well as IV therapy and hyperbaric oxygen and ozone treatments. Even mattress maker Hästens opened up a Sleep Spa hotel in Portugal in 2021.
Guests can get sleep analysis from medical professionals; AI-enhanced, technologically sophisticated beds that provide better sleep; pillow menus; and special diets and services to restore the body’s rhythms and guarantee an exemplary rest. Sleep meditations, sleep trackers, and sleep playlists can be found at discerning hotels across the world.
“Sleep is just one piece of the puzzle,” says Chekitan Dev, a distinguished professor at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. “Sleep well goes with eat well, exercise well, play well, work well, and love well—all potential parts of a hotel stay.”
Sleep’s big moment
Sleep—both our culture’s obsession with it, and the clinical drive to better understand our nocturnal lives—has been a current fascination. When Rebecca Robbins, a Harvard professor and sleep researcher, started studying the topic in 2009, she says it was far from a sexy field; her mentors openly questioned her decision to devote her career to our non-waking hours. Now she works as an adviser and consultant to the Hilton hotel chain, just one of the myriad hospitality giants seeking to cash in on our fitful existence (and find another selling point to stand apart from short-term rental options).
“Wellness is an integral part of everything, and it’s just almost common sense for these hotels in these hospitality groups to do this,” says Anthony Vennare, cofounder of Fitt Insider, a wellness industry newsletter. “I look at it almost like a negative check. Why aren’t they doing these things?”
Mental health, diet, fitness, social media, and hustle culture have all contributed to America’s national sleep deficit; only a third of us get enough rest each night. But the true shift that sent sleep studies—and sleep tourism—into overdrive was the COVID-19 pandemic, Robbins says.
During the first few weeks of the pandemic, despite the stress of the moment, most people stayed home and experienced extra sleep (studies estimate about 25 minutes on average). Robbins called this a global controlled experiment to showcase the value of more rest. Along with the enhanced wellness focus that came out of the pandemic, this awakening helped cement a larger cultural interest in more and better rest.
The response has been a rise in what Fitt Insider calls more investment and spending on the sleep stack: wearables, bedding, apps, therapeutics, and other tools to get better rest. And, of course, a larger market for sleep tourism.
Sleep is the new wellness retreat
Sleep has been a pretty big focus of the hotel industry since its inception. Even recent history has shown the value of making better rest a selling point: Consider the Westin hotel chain’s Heavenly Bed campaign of the late ’90s, which sold the idea of a better night’s rest with a more relaxing mattress. And for decades, one subset of hotel customers made a better night’s rest a deal–breaker, according to Dev. Airline crews would sign lodging contracts guaranteeing higher floors, extra-dark blinds, special protocols for housekeeping and room service, and white noise machines.
But that pales in comparison to the breadth and depth of sleep-related offerings on tap for today’s guests.
Mark Kovacs, VP of health and performance for Canyon Ranch resorts, says the types of treatments and techniques he used training elite athletes are now filtering down to the population at large. A five-night sleep retreat at the chain’s Lenox, Massachusetts, location earlier this year cost $8,800 per person.
“We see the value in people feeling good when they leave, versus needing a vacation once they finish their trip,” he says, noting that he’s increasingly seeing younger consumers, aware of the benefits of better sleep, invest in these kinds of experiences.
Harvard’s Robbins says the sleep tourism concept really took hold over the last few years. And hotels see dollar signs, especially as a means of differentiating high-end experiences and resorts, and keeping high-earning frequent travelers coming back. A 2019 JD Power survey found that guests who experience better-than-expected sleep said they “definitely will” return to a hotel property.
Robbins did a study with 600 travelers, asking them to rate their travel experience, and only a third said they were satisfied with their sleep; she sees that as a compelling opportunity for hotels seeking to improve guest satisfaction. As technology improves, and more wearables provide more direct feedback on better sleep, Kovacs believes the data will drive more sleep tourism spending.
Robbins sees opportunities to take better care of all travelers who want more sleep—adding after-hours massage services, for example—and to cater more elaborate offerings for those traveling specifically to have a sleep/relaxation retreat. A Hilton property in Hawaii, Grand Wailea (the setting for the first season of White Lotus) offers wellness rooms with various sleep-optimizing amenities, including sleep-inducing meals, specialized jet-lag-reducing spa treatments, and lectures on the science of restfulness, for just over $1,000 a night, roughly $300 more than standard rooms.
There has been pushback on the idea that all of these amenities actually do help with sleep, or that a temporary retreat, no matter how well-intentioned, can truly lead to a lifetime of better sleeping habits. Vennare believes that the sleep category will have its share of “gimmicks and nonsense products,” but with consumers becoming more aware of the benefits of sleep, with more money to spend on wellness, the offerings are not likely to go away.
Robbins and others argue that amenities and services grounded in clinical data and research can help. For instance, a sleep retreat isn’t going to help someone with medical issues such as insomnia or sleep apnea. But a thoughtful program that trains someone to recognize bad habits, establish a better routine, and recharge for a few days can make a positive difference.
“Some of this has been critiqued as analogous to greenwashing,” Robbins says. “‘Oh, you know, throw on a pillow menu, and you can get some nice press or whatever.’ But I think some hotels are doing it really, really well.”
And in the meantime, there seems to be no stopping the industry’s growth.
“It will become standard practice that hotels invest in the consumer’s well-being, from sleep and comfort and a considered wellness perspective,” Vennare says. “There is zero chance that sleep does not continue to become a bigger focus for the consumer as a whole, when they travel, what they do, and the lifestyles they build.”
