Wellness, Without the Ceremony

Simplicity and Provenance

When you book a hotel for a weekend away, you’re drawn by location, interior, philosophy, what else you can do there. Food matters enormously. But you expect more now. Farm-to-table isn’t trendy; it’s baseline. It’s about having a sense of place, social and environmental respect and responsibility. It’s also about simplicity and curation in our overstimulated, overcomplicated world. Top-notch modern fine dining gets this. It’s still fine, still skilled, still serious, but it has ditched the stuffiness and po-faced formality and ceremony for ceremony’s sake.

The spa world needs the same reckoning. Provenance and simplicity rule the roost. Local therapists. Local brands. Integration with the landscape, the mood, the vibe. It’s thoughtful. A good wine list, after all, has global and local on offer. But now, what the locality offers is equally, perhaps even more, important. Supporting the local community, the planet, the people: this should be the foundation. It’s why we travel. For a sense of place.

The Flexibility Problem

But here’s what’s still lagging: flexibility. In food and beverage, hotels offer variety. Bar snacks. Fine dining. All-day brunch. Room service. Choice, whenever you want it.

Look at most spas, even today. They open at 9 AM, close at 5 PM. Fixed menu. Barely a request ahead. Rarely a true way to personalise the treatment itself. There’s an industry standard for steak (blue, rare, medium-rare, medium, well-done) and while there is a language for massage pressure, with steak, that standard means something. On the massage table? There is no real standard. What “medium” means to a therapist might feel light or heavy to me. My body might need something completely different. So when they ask “What pressure would you like?” there’s a problem, there’s no framework to fall back on and when face-down in a dimly lit room, practically naked, how do you ask for what you want? You can send an overcooked steak back. You can’t send back a treatment once it’s finished. There’s a vulnerability in the spa that doesn’t exist at the dining table. It requires real skill and intuition and more training in harmony than ceremony.

Some of the best treatments I’ve had are with therapists who, like great chefs, could personalise without throwing the rulebook out the window. They understood protocols exist for good reason, but they seasoned the experience to match my needs. That’s the difference between a technically good treatment and one where the therapist genuinely cared.

I know when a spa has got it the moment I walk in. It’s in how I’m greeted. There’s a script, but they improvise a little, ditching the ceremony so I don’t feel like a number. There’s ease in it. A ‘let’s get on with making this good for you’ feeling rather than a ‘let me perform wellness’ feeling. It’s the three P’s: personalisation, provenance, and personality. Their sense of self is firmly planted in what they offer, where they are. And then come those little surprises I wasn’t expecting, the moments that make you remember a place, and want to return.

So are hotels taking their spa and wellbeing offering as seriously, creatively, and thoughtfully as they take their food and beverage offering? Not enough in my book and I am drawn to and tend to write about the ones that are. These, to me, are the places I feel we are worth our precious time and money. The kind of place where wellness doesn’t feel ceremonial or separate, where it’s woven in, flexible, intuitive, genuinely responsive to who you are and what works for you.

It shouldn’t be as rare as it is, right?

Suzanne Duckett, Cultural & Wellness Specialist and Editor, Onolla London Magazine.