Most boutique hotel owners aren’t adding wellness because they want to.
They’re adding it because they feel they should.
Because wellness is “what the market expects.”
Because everyone else seems to be doing it.
Because not doing it feels like falling behind.
This is the starting point I see again and again.
And it matters more than most people realise.
Because when wellness begins as an obligation rather than a belief, it quietly sets the tone for everything that follows.
Owners invest.
They try to “do it properly.”
They hire experts.
They build facilities.
And yet, something feels off.
What they end up with is a wellness concept that doesn’t feel like them.
It doesn’t align with their vision for the property.
And instead of feeling energising or exciting, it feels heavy.
That’s not an execution problem.
It’s a starting-point problem.
The reason so many wellness concepts struggle is because we begin with the wrong question.
We start with what to build.
What facilities to add.
What trends to follow.
What “proper wellness” is supposed to look like.
Before ever asking who we are as the visionary.
And when wellness isn’t rooted in belief — when the owner doesn’t truly see themselves in the concept — it becomes something that needs to be pushed.
Instead of something that can be stewarded.
After 23 years working in hotel wellness, across boutique properties and larger brands, one thing has become increasingly clear to me:
Who comes before what.
If the visionary doesn’t believe in the wellness concept they’re creating, no amount of optimisation will make it endure.
No team, no consultant, no beautiful facility can compensate for that misalignment.
In this episode, I explore what happens when boutique hotel and retreat owners feel caught between “doing wellness properly” and doing wellness in a way that actually fits who they are, what they value, and what they’re willing to stand behind long-term.
In this episode, I cover three things:
1. Why adding wellness out of obligation creates fragile concepts from the start
When wellness is driven by expectation rather than belief, it becomes something that needs to be pushed not stewarded.
2. The structural mistake of starting with facilities instead of vision
Beginning with spas, gyms, or “proper wellness” before defining the visionary’s point of view is what creates misalignment later.
3. How belief enables stewardship and misalignment makes wellness feel off
Wellness only becomes coherent when the visionary truly believes in what’s been created. Without that, even good ideas struggle to endure.
By the end of this episode, you’ll understand why who you are as the visionary must come before what you build and long before how you execute it.
And why the future of successful wellness concepts won’t belong to those who copy the market best, but to those who are willing to build from belief, alignment, and stewardship.
