Dolores Burgos
May 6, 2022
A good hotel stay starts with a good night's sleep. That can mean a plush mattress, fluffy pillows, a warm comforter and high thread count sheets. And, with the stresses of the last years foregrounding the importance of sleep health, high-end hotels are making sure they put the provision of restful environments at the core of their offer once more.
If you’re nominally in the business of providing customers with a good night’s sleep, for sure you may know that 2021 it was fulled with challenges and opportunities. I say nominally, because for the hotel industry, sleep hasn’t felt like it’s been a top priority for some time. During the 2010s the focus shifted elsewhere, towards the food and drink offer, for instance, or fitness facilities, or a plethora of internal and external experience-based services. Competing on core affordances was set aside. As a result, a 2019 survey by consumer intelligence company J.D. Power found that just 29 per cent of US hotel guests experienced a ‘better than expected’ night’s sleep, despite it being a crucial factor in ensuring their return custom.
Is for that, one of the many way people are battling sleepless nights is turning to hotels as places to recharge or practice better nighttime habits. Equinox Hotel Hudson Yards enlisted a sleep psychologist who has optimized its rooms for snoozing with dark spaces that have sound-canceling walls, blackout windows and Lutron temperature control systems for the perfect rest environment, and the New York City hotel offers sleep kits in the minibar, a bedtime ritual to ease you into slumber and a sleep coach. Mandarin Oriental, Geneva has developed its own Check-up with CENAS Sleep Clinic package that includes an overnight study that records your bodily rhythms, movements and other parameters to identify possible sleep disorders.
Due to open this 2022, Phuket’s Tri Vananda is a wellness resort comprised of 70 guest villas, a medical centre specializing in integrative and functional medicine and cognitive wellbeing, and a wetland nature reserve. Each villa is purpose built to maximize restfulness, from the circadian lighting system to the acoustic insulation, aromatherapy provision, air quality monitoring, WiFi blockers and electromagnetic shielding.
Downtown L.A.’s Hotel Figueroa has created its new Rest & Recovery Suite with the help of some fitness brands: preorder a Pluto Pillow—customized to your napping preferences—so it’s waiting in the suite and then sprawl out on an Eight Sleep mattress that uses smart technology to adjust the temperature on each side of the bed. The next day, work out with the suite’s FORME personal strength fitness mirror, and then use Normatec recovery tools from Hyperice.
Some hotel brands are making sleep a company-wide initiative. The Langham Hotels & Resorts has partnered with the World Sleep Society for its new Sleep Matters program, which includes a turndown kit (stocked with herbal tea, earplugs, an eye mask, sleep tip cards and an all-natural sleep aid beverage), a wellness menu (including white noise machines, pillow options and weighted blankets) and a snooze-inducing Spotify playlist. Rosewood Hotels & Resorts recently introduced its Alchemy of Sleep offerings designed to promote rest. They’re unique in each destination, like Rosewood Little Dix Bay’s Acu Doze acupuncture; Hôtel de Crillon, A Rosewood Hotel’s sleep naturopathy consultations; and Rosewood Baha Mar’s bush tea sleep sessions with an herbalist.