Longevity Wellness will Break and Rebuild Hospitality
Hotels aren’t built for the way we travel today. Here’s why I believe wellness will break and rebuild hospitality in the next decade.
Hi, I’m Shan. I run Xandro Lab, a science-first longevity brand in Singapore focused on performance and recovery. Every Sunday, I sit down to write here on Out of Singapore. It started in March 2023 as a way to keep a journal, a place to share what I was building, what I was learning, and the struggles that come with building from scratch.
What you’ll read here is my point of view as of today. A year later, I may think differently — and that’s fine. My duty here is to share my deepest thoughts in real time, as honestly as I can. It’s also a diary for the person I’ll be in five or ten years, to look back and see how my thinking evolved.
This week’s blog is about why I believe wellness experiences will reshape hospitality in the next decade. Here’s how I’ve structured it:
The Shift — why I changed my mind about events and experiences.
The Business Reality — why events are a different model, and what they reveal about consumers.
Why Experiences Still Matter — the non-transactional value they bring to consumers and to us as a brand.
The Future of Hospitality — why the next decade will see wellness breaking and rebuilding hotels, retreats, and clubs.
Let’s start.
1. The Shift: From Selling Online to Building Offline Experiences
When we started Xandro Lab, my focus was clear: we were a direct-to-consumer brand. We sold online, we scaled through ads, and we doubled down on livestreams. That was the playbook.
Which is why, in the beginning, I saw offline events as a complete waste. They didn’t fit the model. We couldn’t track sales directly, we weren’t set up to sell in-person, and the amount of operations they required — venues, logistics, manpower — felt disproportionate to the payoff. For a lean online brand, they looked like a distraction.
But over the past year, that view has changed.
We began small — booths at expos, “spin the wheel” games, product samples. It was fun, but still felt transactional. Then we tried something different. At one of our recent events, we set up a longevity bar where people could order Protocol X like a drink. We hosted Pilates and yoga classes for our community. We ran workshops on sleep science and biomarkers.
And I realized something important: people don’t just want to buy longevity. They want to experience it.
The shift for me was understanding that supplements are only one piece of the puzzle. The real adoption happens when people try things together: plunging into cold water, sitting through a sauna, joining a recovery class, learning about their DNA or biomarkers. These are moments you can’t replicate through an online checkout page.
What I once dismissed as “low ROI” has now become one of the most powerful tools for building trust, community, and belief in what we’re doing.
2. The Business Reality of Experiences
For an online D2C brand like ours, events sit in a completely different business model. Online, we sell directly to consumers, track results in real time, and know exactly how much each click is worth. Events don’t work that way.
They are offline, operationally heavy, and expensive. Costs pile up quickly — venues, logistics, production, staff. And unlike online sales, the returns aren’t immediate or easily measurable. You don’t run an event to “make money” that day. You run it to build trust, to create moments, to plant seeds that may pay off months later.
That’s why many brands avoid them — and why, for a long time, I dismissed them too. But what I’ve learned is that the very things that make events difficult are also what make them powerful.
Because when you get people together, you see something that doesn’t happen online. You see who shows up for a sleep workshop versus who prefers a social club setting. You notice that a doctor’s lecture pulls in a different crowd from a Pilates class. You start to map the real diversity of consumer groups: age, expectations, needs.
That segmentation alone is worth the effort. It tells us what experiences resonate, what doesn’t need repeating, and what new formats we should test.
And it points to something larger: events aren’t just a marketing expense. They’re the bridge into the world I believe is coming — where wellness experiences stop being side projects and start becoming the foundation of hospitality itself.
3. Why Experiences Still Matter
If you zoom out from our own experiments, you see a much bigger pattern: social wellness is proliferating everywhere.
In Singapore, you can now find cold plunge clubs, recovery studios, and run crews almost every weekend. But it’s not just here. In New York and LA, run clubs are as common as gyms. In Seoul, morning fitness “raves” bring together hundreds of people before work — complete with coffee, DJs, and group training. In Australia, calisthenics parks and recovery clubs have become community hubs.
We’ve even tested it ourselves. At one of our recent events, we combined a coffee rave party with product sampling. People didn’t just come for caffeine or supplements — they came for the vibe. That sense of doing something healthy, early, together.
What all of this shows is that longevity — which can feel abstract when framed as “living longer” — becomes real when it’s made social. A pill is invisible. But a sauna, a run club, or a recovery session is visible, collective, and repeatable.
That’s the real reason experiences matter. They:
Break friction. People don’t see us as a company pushing products; they see us as humans sharing practices.
Expand the toolkit. We can’t sell a cold plunge or a sauna, but we can bring people into those spaces.
Build segmentation clarity. We learn who prefers workshops, who shows up for group fitness, who engages with science talks.
Anchor daily rituals. Longevity isn’t just medical treatments or one-off interventions. It’s the habits you practice daily or weekly — better when done in community.
This is why I believe experiences are a key piece of the longevity ecosystem. They don’t replace products, but they make the mission tangible. And if you look at what’s happening globally, they’re not a trend — they’re a wave.
4. The Future of Hospitality
That morning at the beach club, I realized something: wellness experiences aren’t just side shows. They’re signals of a much bigger shift that will break and rebuild hospitality itself.
Because the truth is, the current model of hospitality is already cracking. Hotels today are designed around the old equation: a comfortable bed, a decent gym, a good breakfast. Maybe a spa if it’s luxury. But that model was built for a different era — when people traveled to explore cities, and the hotel was just a place to store your bags and sleep at night.
That’s what will break.
Travel itself is changing. People are traveling with new intent: to run a Hyrox race in Berlin, to train Muay Thai in Thailand, to join a wellness retreat in Bali, to get a surgery done in Seoul, to reset their health for a week or a month.
Instead of “seeing the sights,” travel is becoming purposeful — about improving yourself while you’re away. And the current hospitality model — rooms plus amenities — isn’t built for that.
That’s what will be rebuilt.
We’re already seeing the signs.
Equinox has built a hotel model that fuses luxury with performance.
Aman, one of the most prestigious hospitality brands in the world, has launched its own longevity hubs. Here is Aman’s clinic menu.
Five-star hotels everywhere are experimenting with wellness offerings — incomplete today, but moving rapidly in this direction.
What comes next will reshape the industry:
Hotels will no longer sell rooms. They’ll sell recovery. The token gym is dead. Instead, expect longevity suites: circadian lighting, red-light panels, air purification, nutrition plans.
Retreats will move from spiritual to scientific. Biomarker testing on arrival, doctors on-site, recovery programs designed with both science and luxury.
Membership clubs will proliferate in cities. Run clubs, cold plunges, cognition labs — social longevity rituals people practice daily or weekly.
Hospitality will merge with healthcare. A holiday could double as a health reset: biomarkers, trainers, supplements, and devices, all integrated into your stay.
Access will expand. Today, longevity hospitality caters to wealthy executives. But like boutique fitness, it will scale. Mid-market hotels will compete on their ability to deliver recovery, not just comfort.
This is why I say wellness will break and rebuild hospitality. The old face of hotels — beds, gyms, spas — won’t be enough. In the next decade, they’ll be judged by how well they help you heal, recover, and perform.
5. Closing Reflections
The truth is, I don’t have all the answers yet. Running events has been draining for me and my team. They take a different kind of muscle — operationally, financially, even emotionally. Some formats work, others flop. And scaling them into something repeatable is an entirely different challenge from running a D2C brand online.
But I can’t ignore the pull. Every time we run an experience, I feel the resonance. People light up in ways they never do when they just see an ad or open a package at home. They talk to each other. They ask questions. They bring their friends. It feels alive.
That’s what excites me — and also scares me. Because if this really is the future of longevity, then hospitality won’t survive in its old form. It will be broken and rebuilt by wellness — by people asking for more than just a place to sleep.
For now, I’ll keep experimenting. Small events, collaborations, prototypes of what these longevity spaces could look like. I don’t know if we’ll one day run a club, a retreat, or even a hotel. But I do know this: the future of longevity won’t be built on bottles alone. It will be built on experiences people share together.
And I’d love to hear from you: If you could design your own wellness or longevity experience — in your city or on your travels — what would it look like?
Here is a bonus video of a wellness hotel being built in English countryside. They are turning 55 acres of estate into future of hospitality.
Until next Sunday,
—Shan