What is Wellness Travel?

What is Wellness Travel?

In today’s day and age, most of us spend our time running on the hamster wheel we call life. We have obligations to uphold, relationships to tend to, goals and dreams to cultivate, and whatever pops up in our day-to-day. With all the stressors of daily life, more and more people are looking to travel to give them a break from their regular routine and provide betterment of their health and wellbeing.

Welcome to the ever-evolving sector of tourism, Wellness Travel. Over the past two decades, Wellness Travel has evolved from primarily spa experiences to encompass healthy food options, fitness, nature, and other curated activities related to wellbeing. The Wellness Tourism Association defines Wellness Travel as: Travel that allows the traveler to maintain, enhance, or kick-start a healthy lifestyle, and support or increase one’s sense of wellbeing.

A break from the daily grind could be three days or multiple weeks, honestly, the length of time is not of the utmost importance. The most crucial step to creating a Wellness Vacation is making the decision to center your travel around wellness, setting a specific wellness-focused intention. Setting this specific intention, to travel with one’s health and sense of wellbeing at the center, is what makes your trip a Wellness Vacation.

Now that you have decided you want a vacation focused on your well-being, it’s time to start thinking about what kinds of locations and activities support your intention. When it comes to Wellness Vacations, one size does not fit all. One person may want to focus on weight loss and decide to opt for a program that focuses on healthy eating and building a healthy relationship with food. Another person may want to re-center and find inner peace, and they opt for a location that offers yoga and other activities that support self-reflection. Another may want a trip focused on fitness to help release and relieve their stress.

Wellness Vacations can include a variety of activities, such as: spa treatments and therapies, healthy cooking and eating, fitness activities and adventures (snorkeling, hiking, kayaking, skiing, stand-up paddleboarding), spending time in nature, spiritual activities (yoga, meditation classes, local traditional spiritual ceremonies). The list goes on and on.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when to figure out what kind of Wellness Travel you are looking for:

• What causes me the most stress in my daily life?
• What are some activities that I enjoy and can help me release stress?
• What is something I am missing from my life that I want to cultivate?
• What excites me most about getting away?
• Is there a part of the world that I have always wanted to visit?

There are many ways to take action on planning and traveling on the Wellness Vacation you are imagining. One choice is to do it yourself. Spend the time researching destinations, resorts, retreats, activities, and so on. If this is something you enjoy doing, taking the time, and spending the hours planning your trip can be very rewarding. For others, it may be a headache and cause you to forgo the vacation all-together.

For those in the latter category, there are a few different ways you can go about planning and booking your next Wellness Vacation. There is the Wellness Retreat option. An all-inclusive hosted Wellness Retreat is a guided, intention-driven multi-day program with a set schedule hosted by one or more facilitators. This can be a good choice for those wanting to maximize their time in a specific area of wellbeing while enjoying VIP treatment. There is also the choice to hire a Wellness Travel Advisor to plan a customized Wellness Vacation, designed with you in mind. The great thing about a Wellness Travel Advisor is they have the local connections and industry knowledge to create an experience that is truly customized, anywhere in the world. They take care of all the reservations, transportation (if requested), and they are available to you for any last-minute changes while you travel.

Any way you decide to go, taking the time and space to travel for your wellbeing is a big deal. The benefits of Wellness Travel are endless. It allows you to return home relaxed, rested, rejuvenated, and with a new toolkit of healthy mechanisms to help you lead a life of health and vitality.

That sounds pretty great to me! Where to?