'More and more guests want complete wellness in hotel rooms'

Rising demand for exclusive hot tubs, steam rooms and saunas

A communal wellness area where you could join other hotel guests in a hot tub, steam bath or sauna. Until a few years ago, even in luxury multi-star hotels, this was the highest possible option. But especially since the corona crisis, there is a trend that these wellness facilities are increasingly moving to the hotel room. "Guests want more and more comfort and privacy," says owner Niels Nieuweboer of Zaandam-based Cleopatra, a leading international manufacturer of high-quality wellness products.

Cleopatra's wellness products can be found in hotels all over the world, from the Grand Hotel Amrâth Kurhaus in Scheveningen to the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental in Dubai. "India is also an enormous growth market for us, although that continent is still lagging behind Europe in the field of wellness", says Nieuweboer, who has identified a clear wellness trend, especially in the European hotel industry: "After the decline during the Corona crisis, mainly high-end hotels are investing heavily again and developing plans to offer hotel guests even more comfort. Where a hotel room used to have just a bathtub, you now increasingly see complete wellness environments being fitted out, complete with a whirlpool, steam bath and sauna."

Nieuweboer continues: "Such superdeluxe rooms can be found, for example, in Hotel TwentySeven in Amsterdam and Hotel Reehorst in Ede. This trend of personalised rooms is also related to the increased need for privacy, as fewer and fewer hotel guests feel the need to use a traditional shared wellness area together with other guests. Taking a naked seat in a sauna next to a complete stranger to a hotel guest is also increasingly perceived as unpleasant. In that respect, you see that people have become a bit more prudish after all. To distinguish themselves, luxury multi-star hotels in particular are now responding to this."

When investing in more exclusivity, hotel owners nowadays also pay explicit attention to sustainability, says Nieuweboer. "Because saunas, steam baths and other wellness products consume a lot of energy, we at Cleopatra have developed numerous energy-saving solutions. Equipment in a wellness area, for instance, used to be on all day. But now many products are equipped with a sensor or push button, for example, for turning on a bubble bath. At times when no one is using it, such a product is in standby mode which minimises power consumption. This obviously makes for huge energy savings."

In addition, Nieuweboer says there are increasing demands for safety and hygiene. "Suppose hotel guests continuously complain that no clean water comes out of the jetstream of a bubble bath; then housekeeping is busy cleaning it every day. To prevent this, we have devised all kinds of smart systems that ensure that an installation always remains optimally clean, so that housekeeping does not have to worry about it."

Talking about smart systems: Nieuweboer expects more and more wellness installations to be fitted with smart software in the future. "This will make it possible for us as a manufacturer to read a wellness product remotely, for example when there is a malfunction or to check when maintenance is needed. That way, we can take a lot of work off a hotel's technical department's hands. We already notice that more and more hotels are asking us to supply such 'smart products'. Incidentally, we are currently already doing a lot of testing with these, which will enable us to offer even more targeted service in the near future."

While in the high-end, wellness facilities are increasingly moving to the hotel room, at most other hotels the traditional shared spa remains prevalent. But time is not standing still here either. "A new product of ours, for example, is the cool down room, designed to cool down properly after sweating in a sauna or steam bath," says Nieuweboer. "This prefabricated cabin works on the basis of dry cold that efficiently cools the entire body. This offers a gentler, more pleasant experience than exposure to ice-cold water in a plunge pool."