MIAMI—The Global Wellness Summit (GWS), the leading conference for the $3.7 trillion global wellness industry, announced that the co-founders of wellness media powerhouse Well+Good, Alexia Brue and Melisse Gelula, will keynote at the conference being held at The Breakers Palm Beach, Fla., from October 9 to 11, 2017. In seven short years, Brue and Gelula have built Well+Good into the leading media company dedicated to the U.S. wellness scene, and the top source of intel on the boutique fitness, nutrition, beauty and healthy travel scene. Their highly anticipated annual trends forecast has proven one of the most prescient: predicting everything from the athleisure to the clean beauty to the juicing trend, and covered everywhere from CBS This Morning to The New York Times.
In their Summit keynote they will provide crucial insight into how millennials are now disrupting the wellness travel market. Sharing results from a new survey detailing how their community of 7 million millennial women travel, they will analyze the very different things millennials want in their wellness getaways compared with boomers: what they seek in fitness, food, and other lifestyle components. And they will connect the dots between millennials’ wellness and travel spending behaviors and how hospitality brands offering wellness programming can start benefiting from them.
“The wellness market is booming in cities far beyond New York and LA, with barre studios, avocado toast and smoothie bars becoming a true global phenomenon in 2017,” noted Gelula. “And we’re excited to present on future transformations in wellness travel. For instance, if spas were once ‘fix-me!’ destinations for boomers who knew little about wellness, modern consumers—especially millennials—increasingly have their own very sophisticated wellness tastes. The result: far more people now travel to deepen their existing wellness practice, rather than have their wellness light switched on.”
“Millennials are the most wellness-obsessed group ever, consuming more healthy products and services, on average, than any generation before,” noted Brue. “They have their own local wellness gurus, whether their trusted yoga or meditation teacher. And they crave vacations and retreat experiences curated by these trusted experts over legacy spa brands whose names they might know but don’t necessarily trust. There is much to discuss: including the growing transfer of trust from the destination spa brand to the local wellness expert and what ‘brands’ and experiences will matter more in the future.”
The GWS is a conference for senior industry executives and leaders; for information about attending, click here.
