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Emily Johnson of Elevate Hospitality Collective shares her ideas for low-cost wellness activations that boutique hotels can use to increase ancillary revenue without spa CapEx.
The wellness conversation in hospitality has been distorted by a misleading premise. Owners and asset managers keep asking what it would cost to build a destination spa, and that question stops most boutique projects before they start. The capital is real, the timeline is long, and the operational disruption is significant. What is in dispute is whether you actually need any of it to capture the wellness premium.
The sixth edition of the HotStats and RLA Global Wellness Real Estate Report is worth reading before the next capital planning meeting. Properties classified as Major Wellness hotels generated TRevPAR that was 108 per cent higher than properties with no wellness offering, and 56 per cent higher than properties with minor wellness positioning. Minor wellness properties, the ones running lean activations rather than full clinical operations, posted the strongest year-on-year RevPAR and TRevPAR growth in 2024 across the luxury and upper upscale segments. The asset-light side of the curve is where the velocity is.
Knight Frank’s UK Hotel Trading Performance Review for 2025 confirms the pattern. Leisure revenues across UK hotels with a leisure offering rose by an average of 6.0 percent per occupied room in 2025, with wellbeing as the primary driver. Wellness ancillary held up while rate compressed.
Many boutique hotels think adding a true wellness offering is out of their budget, but having worked on several projects in the last 12-months; I wanted to share some I’ve seen drive revenue without large CapEx. Below are five activations with demonstrated commercial proof points.
1. The pre-arrival wellness upsell
The single most underused revenue lever in boutique hospitality is the pre-arrival email window. Oaky’s aggregated client data shows that a targeted offer sent 12 days before check-in produces a click-through rate of around 48 percent and a conversion rate of 10.6 per cent. Hotel Tech Insight’s analysis of Nor1 and Oracle data reports that properties implementing digital pre-arrival upselling see 15 to 25 percent increases in ancillary revenue overall.
The Cross Hotels and Resorts case study is instructive. When the team at Away Bali Legian Camakila tested different pre-arrival offers through Oaky, two of the highest-performing items were a yoga class and a champagne breakfast. The yoga class had been treated internally as a soft amenity. Once it was priced, packaged, and offered 12 days before arrival, it became one of the most-booked add-ons in the portfolio.
What this means in practice: a single sunrise yoga session, priced at $20 to $35, with one instructor on a $250 weekly contractor cost, generates meaningful incremental revenue when sold as a pre-arrival add-on rather than promoted in the lobby. The CapEx is essentially zero, the operational lift is one weekly contractor, and the revenue is incremental to the room rate, which is the definition of TRevPAR accretion.
2. The social wellness pop-up partnership
The rise of social wellness clubs, including Othership, Remedy Place, Sage and Sound, and Bathhouse, has created a new category of partner for boutique hotels with rooftops, terraces, courtyards, or oversized lobbies. The partner brings the equipment, the certified facilitators, and an existing audience of high-spending locals. The hotel provides the venue and captures the F&B.
The economics are concrete. Ticket pricing for a guided breathwork or contrast bathing event typically runs $35 to $55 per attendee. A hotel hosting two events per week, at 30 attendees per event, with a 50-50 revenue share and an average of $40 per session, generates roughly $30,000 per quarter in event revenue alone. The more important number is the F&B attach rate. Social wellness attendees are sober-curious, they arrive 30 minutes early, they stay 90 minutes afterward, and spend on tonics, mocktails, and small plates. The category is also disproportionately Gen Z and Millennial, which addresses the loyalty gap most independent properties face with that demographic.
The practical step is to identify a local operator and propose a recurring Sunday morning or Wednesday evening series. The hotel commits the space, the partner commits the programming, and both parties share ticketing and F&B outcomes. There is no infrastructure investment required beyond a portable sauna or ice baths that the partner already owns.
3. The sleep ritual package
Sleep tourism is the wellness sub-category with the strongest demand signal and the lowest barrier to entry. Wellness tourism spending overall sits at 136 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, and a recent industry survey found that 76 per cent of travellers want trips that centre on stress reduction. Sleep is the universal entry point, and it does not require a spa license or treatment rooms to commercialise.
The Santa Monica Proper has built one of the most-discussed examples in the market with its in-room Lullaby Sound Bath, a 60-minute experience delivered at the end of the day in the guest’s own room. The Springs Resort in Colorado runs Sleep Ritual Trays, a curated set of teas, tinctures, and reading materials delivered to the room. Hilton has partnered with sleep researcher Dr Rebecca Robbins from Harvard Medical School to develop ritual breath work content distributed across the portfolio.
The boutique opportunity is the package. A sleep concierge add-on priced at $60 to $110, including a turndown ritual with magnesium spray, herbal tea service, a blackout sleep mask, a downloadable audio file produced with a local sound practitioner, and a take-home element, carries a cost of goods of roughly $10 to $15. The margins are textbook ancillary. The package also functions as a rate justification tool, because its presence on the booking confirmation reframes the property as a wellness destination and supports the rate the guest just paid, even when the add-on is declined.
4. The local wellness practitioner collection
The B&B model and the boutique model have always relied on the local relationship as a point of differentiation. What has changed is that wellness practitioners, previously hard to monetise as hotel partners, are now structured businesses with their own marketing engines, certifications, and pricing discipline. A boutique hotel that curates a panel of three to five local practitioners, including a Reiki practitioner, a sound healer, a breathwork facilitator, a yoga instructor, and a local herbalist, can offer in-room and in-property services without carrying any of them as employees.
The commission model is the cleanest. The practitioner sets their own rate, the hotel adds a 20-30 percent markup, and the booking flows through the concierge or an in-room QR code. The hotel carries no payroll, no insurance liability beyond the venue, and no inventory. The Mayakoba resort in Mexico has run a version of this for years with its Temazcal ceremony, delivered by a local practitioner outside the resort’s payroll.
For a country house hotel, a Cotswolds property, or a Highlands estate, the practitioner panel converts the surrounding community into a programmable asset. The Reiki practitioner is already there. The forest bathing guide already exists in the next village. The booking infrastructure is the only missing piece: a landing page, a contract template, and a commission tracker.
5. The nature-based activation
Forest bathing, guided sunrise walks, foraging experiences, wild swimming with a certified guide, and dawn birdwatching with a local naturalist all fall under the minor wellness segment, which posted the strongest 2024 growth in the HotStats data. Costs are negligible, partnerships are with sole-trader practitioners who charge $65 to $200 per group session, and package pricing runs $45 to $100 per guest.
Populus Denver has developed a useful case study on commercializing the relationship with nature. The property runs a One Night, One Tree program with the National Forest Foundation, donates one per cent of revenue to environmental causes, and provides guests with promotional codes for AllTrails+ access. These activations are essentially free to the property, but they reframe the entire guest experience around the natural setting. The result is a brand identity that supports both rate and length-of-stay growth in a market that competes on design.
What the numbers actually suggest
What is missing in most boutique hotels is not the wellness offering. It is the commercial discipline applied to wellness. Each of the five activations above can be modelled as a P&L line item, tracked against an attach rate and a contribution margin, and reviewed in the weekly commercial meeting alongside ADR and occupancy. That is the operating change that converts wellness from a brand veneer into a measurable revenue and profit driver.
