At one time, it was new and exciting for hotels to offer a room service menu featuring cheeseburgers and cold drinks to guests looking to unwind at the end of a long day. But thanks to the work of one forward-thinking health expert, some hotels can now offer a new kind of menu: one featuring IV drips and cryotherapy.
Dr. Jonathan Leary built a successful wellness practice fine-tuning world-class athletes and high-performing executives using holistic methods to make his patients more proactive when it came to their mental and physical well-being. Now he’s helping to shape the future scope of health and wellness services that high-end hotels can offer supremely health-conscious guests looking to rebalance during long, taxing trips.
Remedy Place, opening this fall on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, is Leary’s hybrid social club and boutique wellness facility where guests are invited to treat their brains and bodies with an array of custom, cutting-edge services typically reserved for professional athletes and ageless celebrities. Remedy Place is partnering with local hotels to offer guests advanced health and wellness services not typically found on the premises. After all, boutique hotels aren’t normally outfitted with hyperbaric chambers and acupuncturists. For travelers seeking those treatments, Remedy Place offers a solution.
“Everyone wants that wellness edge when they travel; ideas like Equinox hotels are booming because people still want all of those services,” Leary says. “For the ones that don’t have it, we’re a direct referral over. Even the hotels that do have spas have minimal wellness service. They have more beauty—think massages, manicures, pedicures—and we’re not doing that at Remedy Place. There’s no overlap.”
Remedy Place taps into positive wellness growth trends. This booming industry has already crept into hospitality in the form of in-room treadmills, smart mattresses, and even womb-shaped beds that promote deeper, restorative sleep. According to the Global Wellness Institute, a growing spa sector and expanded wellness travel help to power a $4.2 trillion global wellness economy, as more people are conscious of the wear and tear work, life, and travel put on their minds and bodies.
“I think people are really starting to understand,” Leary says. “If you look over the past years, the whole recovery in self-care industry has skyrocketed; people are starting to realize that their bodies are giving them problems and there are side effects when they start adding all these stresses to their bodies, or because they’re working out on a regular basis, they’re getting injured or they’re in pain.
“There’s also a lot of mistrust now with the whole healthcare system,” he says. “People don’t want to be on drugs anymore. They don’t want to get surgery. They’re seeking everything and anything to improve their body naturally.”
Leary’s philosophy is that the epitome of health comes only when you can achieve internal balance, or homeostasis. His work taps into seven elements of balance that include mind, movement, cold, compression, oxygen, nutrients, and heat.
“What we’re doing is we’re proving that, hey, your body is this amazing healing machine if you give it the proper tools. All we want to do is put the body in the best state so it can heal itself, and we can do that with all science-based technologies.”
“We’re not telling people that it doesn’t take hard work, that there are shortcuts,” he says. “There’s no way to cheat your body and are no shortcuts with your health. What we’re doing is we’re proving that, hey, your body is this amazing healing machine if you give it the proper tools. All we want to do is put the body in the best state so it can heal itself, and we can do that with all science-based technologies.”
Instead of offering facials, Remedy Place is where jet-lagged guests can go to rebalance their circadian rhythm after a cross-country flight. It’s where health-conscious travelers can consult with experts to identify how they can maximize their focus and energy or simply lounge by the bar and listen to live music while plugged into a vitamin IV drip.
Remedy Place is unique in that it seeks to combine the social setting of a lounge with a high-end treatment facility. Pulling from his private wellness practice, where there’s a six-month waitlist to meet with Leary, Remedy Place’s service menu also includes infrared sauna suites, ice breath classes, cryotherapy, movement therapy, massages, meditation, and sound bath classes. Leary plans to also host events where guests can unwind and recharge “almost like a hotel lobby setup.”
Participating hotels will have Remedy Place menus available at the concierge to share with guests outlining its services, remedies, and treatments, no different than ordering a cheeseburger off the room service menu. Says Leary, “We’re just another thing they can add to their tool belt to really make sure that their guests are happy.”
And healthy.
