Well Being in Hospitality

1. How important is the topic of well-being today? Should we talk about it?

From my perspective as someone who works between human systems and emerging technology, the question isn’t “should we talk about it”:it’s “are we willing to redesign around it?” Talking is easy. What’s hard is untangling the operational complexity, the cultural assumptions, and the misaligned incentives that keep well-being stuck as a line item instead of a design principle. That’s the work.

2. What is your well-being definition?

Well-being is the capacity of a person, or a system, to function with clarity, resilience, and purpose. It’s not the absence of stress. It’s the presence of conditions that allow people to see clearly, act confidently, and recover when things go sideways.

In my consultancy, we define capacity as the real measure of health- for individuals and organizations. Well-being, to me, is what happens when the system around a person is designed to support their ability to think, feel, connect, and contribute. It’s physical, psychological, social, and structural. And it’s always relational, your well-being is shaped by the systems you’re embedded in, and in hospitality, that means the environment, the culture, the workflows, and the relationships between guests and the people who serve them.

3. How would you define psychological or mental well-being for guests in a hospitality context?

For guests, psychological well-being is the haptic and emotional experience of being held by an environment that anticipates your needs without surveilling you. It’s the feeling of safety, ease, and genuine restoration, not just the performance of relaxation.

In practice, this means: cognitive relief (the reduction of decision fatigue, logistical friction, and ambient stress), emotional safety (feeling seen without being watched, welcomed without being managed), sensory coherence (environments where light, sound, scent, and space are designed with intentionality rather than by default), and continuity of care (experiences that don’t end at checkout but extend into how a guest carries that sense of well-being back into their daily life).

4. How would you define psychological or mental well-being for employees in a hospitality context?

For employees, psychological well-being is the sustained ability to do meaningful work without it costing you your health, your relationships, or your sense of self.

Well-being for employees is not a wellness app or a pizza party. It’s the design of the job itself and their ability to share ideas about how to do their jobs better - a soft innovation process where employees are tapped to submit suggestions for optimizing their roles and responsibilities.  This engenders agency and empowerment - where employees feel like a part of the process and become more invested in their work and ultimately this benefits them, the company and the guests. 

5. What is the current state of practice regarding guest psychological/mental well-being in the hospitality industry?

 What I see emerging and find very promising is the demand for authenticity. Travelers are becoming both more informed and more skeptical. Wellness claims are easy to research, hype and easy to spot, and guests are gravitating toward morecredible, evidence-based experiences rather than vague promises of “transformation.”

6. What is the current state of practice regarding employee psychological/mental well-being in the hospitality industry?

 What’s largely missing is structural redesign. The root causes of employee mental health challenges:chronic understaffing, unpredictable schedules, low wages, emotional labor, and a culture that normalizes suffering:remain largely intact.  That’s not an attitude problem. That’s a design problem.  It’s tied to my answer in question #4 = soft innovation.  Employees should be integrated into processes that directly affect their work product and best practices so they feel seen and heard so they don’t just feel like a cog in the machine. 

7. Is there a relationship between guest psychological/mental well-being and the overall guest experience?

This relationship is foundational. Guest experience IS psychological well-being, whether the industry frames it that way or not. Every touchpoint in a hotel stay either adds to or depletes a guest’s sense of ease, safety, and restoration.

The industry has long measured satisfaction through service speed, room cleanliness, and amenity quality. These matter. But to me the deeper driver is: did this place make me feel like a human being? Did it give me something I couldn’t get at home? That’s a well-being question.

8. Is there a relationship between employee psychological/mental well-being and the guest experience?

This is perhaps the most important relationship in the entire industry, and the one most consistently underinvested in. You cannot deliver genuine hospitality through a burned-out workforce. It’s that simple.

It seems very clear (from my own personal experiences and studies done on the hospitality industry)  burned-out employees are less engaged, less attentive, and less capable of the emotional labor that hospitality demands. When staff are struggling, service becomes performative rather than authentic. Guests feel the difference, they sense when warmth is real versus when it’s a script. And that’s the exact opposite experience you want for your guests and your employees.

9. To what extent is the hospitality industry responsible for supporting or enhancing guest well-being?

The word hospitality comes from the Latin “hospes", meaning both host and guest. The entire premise of the industry is the care of people who are away from home. So the question isn’t whether the industry is responsible, it's how seriously it takes the responsibility it already claimed.

That said, responsibility has limits. Hospitality should not position itself as healthcare or therapy. The industry’s role is to create environments and experiences that support well-being not to diagnose or treat unless it’s connected with practitioners with real domain expertise and training. 

10. Which factors do you expect to have the greatest impact on guest psychological/mental well-being over the next two to three years?

The continued escalation of digital overstimulation. People are arriving at hotels more wrung out than ever. The demand for genuine disconnection will intensify. Properties that can engineer calm into the physical environment  - using a variety of design tools including Biophilia -  will have a significant competitive advantage.

Another factor, and one connected to digital overstimulation is loneliness and social disconnection. The WHO has identified loneliness as a global health threat. Hospitality is uniquely positioned to address loneliness by creating conditions for meaningful human connection without forced socializing.  

Each group (hospitality and guest) is different, so thoughtful and rigorous research is necessary to meet everyone where they are - rather than slapping on some Zeitgeist template that generally doesn’t work for either or both parties. 

11 .What factors do you expect to have the greatest impact on employee psychological/mental well-being over the next two to three years?

The labor shortage will continue to be the dominant force. With foreign-born workers accounting for a third of the travel workforce and immigration enforcement intensifying, understaffing will worsen before it improves. This puts more pressure on remaining employees, creating a compounding cycle of burnout and turnover.

AI and automation will be a double-edged sword. On one hand, automating repetitive tasks (check-in, scheduling, inventory) can free employees to focus on higher-value, more engaging work. On the other hand, poorly implemented technology creates new stress, surveillance anxiety, skill displacement, and the fear of obsolescence. The organizations that use AI to build capacity rather than replace people will see the biggest well-being gains.

Generational expectations will also reshape the conversation. Gen Z workers are less willing to accept the old bargain (“pay your dues, work the brutal hours”). They expect transparency, purpose, mental health support, and career pathways that respect their whole lives. Organizations that can’t meet these expectations will hemorrhage young talent.

Finally, the normalization of mental health conversations, driven by broader cultural shifts, will increase pressure on organizations to move beyond awareness campaigns toward genuine structural change. The gap between what companies say about well-being and what employees actually experience will become harder to hide.  I think the recent story about NOMA indicates there needs to be more rigorous conversations about behavior, expectations and remedies within the hospitality industry. They happen to be a tall poppy so of course they’re a high profile target, but problematic behavior towards employees exists in every industry.

12. What emerging trends or innovations (technological, social, cultural, or organizational) do you believe will most influence psychological/mental well-being in the hospitality industry in the coming years?

Technologically: AI-driven personalization of the guest wellness journey (from pre-arrival profiling to post-stay continuity), biometric-informed environment design (spaces that adapt lighting, temperature, and sound to occupant physiology), and digital platforms that extend wellness routines beyond the stay itself. The transition from episodic wellness tourism to continuous wellness relationships is a major shift.

Socially + Educationally: The demand for community and connection as a wellness modality. Loneliness is emerging as one of the defining health challenges of this decade, and hospitality has an extraordinary opportunity to become a site of genuine human connection, not just service delivery.  For example the unique proposition of Roads + Kingdoms - who provide incredible access to culinary group experiences grounded in rigorous research, mutually beneficial partnerships with the artisans in the countries they visit.

Organizationally: The most important innovation will be the simplest and hardest, redesigning work itself. Job rotation, four-day work weeks, predictable scheduling, profit sharing, and genuine career architecture. The organizations that treat employee well-being as a design challenge (not a benefits problem) will outperform.

13. What do you see as the biggest barriers preventing hospitality organizations from adopting more advanced well-being practices?

The biggest barrier is complexity aversion. Well-being is a systems problem, and most organizations are still structured to solve point problems. They’ll invest in a meditation room but won’t redesign the scheduling system that’s causing the stress. They’ll launch a wellness menu for guests but won’t examine whether their own employees have time to eat a proper meal during a shift. This is exactly the kind of “stuck” that my consultancy exists to untangle.

Most organizations don’t have robust frameworks for measuring well-being outcomes:for guests or employees. Without measurement, well-being remains a philosophy rather than a practice. The industry needs better tools, better data, and better feedback loops.

14. If you had to share one key message about guest and/or employee well-being, what would it be?

Well-being is not a department. It’s not a program, a perk, or a pillar on a strategy deck. It’s the operating system of hospitality itself.

Every system in your organization: how you schedule, how you design spaces, how you onboard, how you communicate, how you measure success is either building or eroding well-being for the people inside it and the people it serves. The organizations that understand this will stop treating well-being as an add-on and start treating it as the through-line that connects employee experience, guest experience, brand integrity, and financial resilience.

Teach the system. Trust the human. That’s the work.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

We’re at an inflection point. The pandemic cracked open something the hospitality industry had been able to keep closed for a long time: the gap between the experience we promise and the conditions we actually create for guests and for the people who make those experiences possible. 

The organizations that close that gap with honesty, design rigor, and genuine care for human beings will define the next era of hospitality. The ones that don’t will keep wondering why their best people leave and their guests don’t come back.