The Wellness in Hospitality Podcast

Sonal Uberoi

Get insights firsthand! Join top global wellness expert and author, Sonal Uberoi, as she shares insights from hoteliers all over the world, managing all types of hotels, each with their unique set of challenges (location, owners, regulations, teams, etc.), and learn their wellness in hospitality best practices.

  1. 2d ago

    184. Brilliant, But Vanilla - Why “A Little Better” Is the Problem

    You inherited a hotel. The market now says it needs wellness, so you look at what everyone else is doing, and do it a little better. That’s exactly how luxury hospitality became what it is today: brilliant, but vanilla.  When I wrote The Wellness Asset, the challenge was clear. Most hotels were getting wellness wrong. Gyms were these decorative areas shoehorned into discarded back of house spaces, spas were an afterthought, and the offering added nothing to the value of the property. So I created a process to design wellness properly and to steward it well so its success lasts.  Years later, that box is ticked. More and more hoteliers are doing it well. Their wellness offering is coherent, well run and adding value.  Yet something is missing.   As I’ve watched spa become wellness, and wellness become longevity, I keep seeing the same pattern. We look at the hotel next door, take what we love, and do it a little better (or so we think). The result is excellent, well thought through, and almost identical to what a guest could find anywhere else.  However, looking back at the clients I have worked with, the ones who have truly blown my mind never followed that playbook. They had the audacity to create something completely different, something they could feel before they could fully picture it. They had the stubbornness to stand by it when everyone around them doubted it, and they had the tenacity to carry it past the finish line. Their guests can’t quite name what makes these hotels different, but they come back year after year. And there is nothing otherworldly about their wellness offering.  That is what my second book, Felt, Not Forgotten, is about. In this episode I share the thinking behind it.  In today’s episode, we’ll uncover:    1.- Why following the market, even brilliantly, is the fastest route to a forgettable hotel  2.- The limit that design and stewardship can’t break through, and why it sits with the leader rather than the offering  3.- The difference between a correct leader and a felt leader, and the three traits it takes to create a hotel guests can’t stop coming back to    By the end of this episode, you will understand why the hotels guests never forget are built by leaders who refuse to play it safe, and why the playbook on hospitality leadership may be exactly what’s holding you back.

  2. Oct 18

    183. The Spa Expert’s Blind Spot: Why Expertise Alone Doesn’t Pay

    If you’re a spa or wellness director with years of experience behind you… If you’ve ever said “they just don’t get wellness”… If you’re thinking about consulting, or you’ve started and the money isn’t following… This episode is for you. You can walk into any hotel and know within minutes what’s wrong with the spa. You can read a drawing and see the changing room in the wrong place. That instinct took you decades to build. It’s a blessing. And when you become a consultant, it can cost you clients. Expertise on its own is not a business. What you know matters less than how you use it to get your client what they want. For the first 10 to 15 years of my consultancy, I carried frustration around like a heavy backpack. I was frustrated that owners didn’t get wellness, that design teams put a crèche next to a treatment room, and that guests had to cross the bar in their robes to reach the spa. Then I opened a project for an investment group from outside hospitality. The president told me one thing. “With this wellness facility, I want to treble our ADR, double our occupancy, and be the best hotel in the Iberian Peninsula.” He didn’t need me to explain the value of wellness. He already understood it. He needed me to deliver it.  I’ve never researched so hard, but this time not to learn more about wellness, but to learn what it takes to actually triple ADR and position a hotel as number 1 in the region. I interviewed the whole executive team: marketing, sales, revenue, even the people out in the vineyard. I wanted to know why guests came and how wellness could make this the number one hotel in Spain and Portugal. A whole world opened up to me. That’s when I realised that when we say “they don’t get wellness,” we’re really saying we don’t get them.  In this episode, you’ll learn:  1.- The expert’s blind spot. Why the expertise that made you a great spa director can become a curse once you’re consulting, and why “they don’t get it” is really a sign that you don’t get them.  2.- Guide, not hero. Your client is the hero and you’re the guide. When you compete for the hero’s role, you become the villain.  3-.- Unreasonable hospitality for consultants. Why so many consultants forget everything they know about wowing guests the moment they start working with clients, and how over-delivering without scope creep is what turns expertise into income.  By the end of this episode, you’ll know why your expertise alone won’t make you money as a consultant. You’ll also know the two shifts that will: making your client the hero of their own journey, and giving them the hospitality you’ve given guests your whole career.

  3. Oct 11

    182. Why the Best Spa Directors Struggle as Consultants

    I had the expertise and I also had clients. Yet my best year as a consultant still paid less than my old job as a global head of wellness.  If you've reached the top of your game and can't understand why consulting isn't paying off, this episode is for you.  I set up my consultancy in 2008, sure I'd be a brilliant consultant. I'd worked with the best brands, opened the grandest spas and been promoted all the way to global head.  Oh boy, how wrong was I.  Twice, I was forced to crawl back into full-time employment: once for two years, the next for one. For five or six years, I even taught English on the side to make ends meet. I lived in feast and famine, exhausted with just one or two clients. And I signed clients I knew weren't right for me, because I needed the money.  I did everything I was told. I chased hotel chains and openings, taught in hospitality schools, spoke at conferences, posted on LinkedIn and published an e-book. Then I looked outside the industry: masterminds, business coaches, every business book I could find. None of it was built for hospitality wellness. My business coaches' advice? "Change your niche."  I didn't. I became obsessed with cracking the code instead. Today, I can have up to 15 clients on the go, and I'm less tired than when I had one or two.  In this episode, we cover three things:  1.- Why we were all guessing.Everyone who reached the top of the corporate ladder was chasing the same one or two big projects and the same teaching positions. We weren't building businesses. We were copying each other.  2.- Why generic business advice doesn't work for hospitality wellness.What happened when I took my problem outside the industry, and why "change your niche" was the wrong answer.  3.- The five questions that changed my business.Which path is right for me? What exactly do I sell, when I can do so much? How do I become the obvious choice? How do I sign clients, deliver and get referrals? And how do I build it all without draining my savings?  By the end of this episode, you'll understand why being brilliant at your craft isn't enough to make money as a consultant, and the five questions you need to answer to turn your expertise into a business.

  4. Oct 4

    181. The Golden Rule I Wish Every Hotelier Knew About Wellness

    Have you ever looked back at a wellness concept you were so proud of, and barely recognised what it had become?  Then tune in, because this episode is for you.  This episode is for my hotelier friends out there. But, if you're building any kind of wellness business, this golden rule solves the problem before it starts.  I've distilled more than two decades in this industry, plus my years in Goldman Sachs before it, down to one rule. And once you understand it, you can diagnose exactly where any wellness business is falling short.  Here it is: Wellness succeeds or fails at the level it is designed. It endures at the level it is stewarded. And the level of success you enjoy will never, ever outperform the size of your vision for that wellness business, and your capacity to hold that vision.  I arrived at this rule through several success stories, and through even more failures.  When I first started out, I thought a successful wellness concept meant a fancy brand, a big-name guru, a slick spa menu, the best facilities money could buy. It worked for a few months. Then nothing. I was designing around individual elements, not around what those elements were meant to achieve for the business as a whole.  So I started working differently. I went deep on values, on purpose, on why wellness mattered to that specific hotel. And that produced a second wave of concepts that actually worked as assets, contributing real revenue and real brand value.  I thought I'd cracked it. Box ticked.  Then, about ten years in, someone updating my website asked for success stories. I pulled up properties I'd built a decade earlier, and I couldn't put them forward. They didn't resemble what we'd created. Same amazing owners, same stress-tested concept, no corners cut. But nobody had stewarded it. That's when the second half of the rule landed: design gets you success, but only stewardship makes it last.  Later still, I worked with hoteliers turning around bleeding wellness businesses, and even after fixing the design and building the right team, some of them barely broke even. That's when the third piece clicked. You can design it right and steward it well, and still stay firmly in the sea of sameness, because the level of success you get will never exceed the size of your vision, and your capacity to carry that vision through .  Think about SHA Wellness Clinic here in Spain. People want to replicate what the Bataller family built. But they rarely know the size of the vision behind it, or the two decades of conscientious work it took to hold that vision, especially back when nobody in Spain was even talking about wellness clinics.  In today's episode, here are the 3 things you'll learn:  1.- Why wellness succeeds or fails at the level it's designed, and why chasing brands, treatments, or bling facilities will never be enough on its own.  2.- Why even a beautifully designed wellness concept won't survive ten years without deliberate stewardship, and what stewardship actually looks like in practice.  3.- Why your level of success will never outperform the size of your vision and your capacity to hold it, no matter how well you've designed or stewarded the concept.  By the end of this episode, you'll have a simple diagnostic for any underperforming wellness business: is it a design issue, a stewardship issue, or a vision issue? You'll know exactly where to look first, and you'll understand why some of the most admired wellness brands in the world took decades of held vision to build, not a single well-designed launch.

  5. Sep 27

    180. Escape The Feast-Famine Cycle

    Do you find that one day you have more clients than you can possibly deal with, and then suddenly, none?  Then tune in, because this episode is for you.  This episode is about the cycle almost every new consultant falls into, why it has nothing to do with talent or demand, and the one number that will keep you out of it for good.  I've lived this cycle myself, back when I started out. And it's called the feast-famine cycle.  You leave employment on a high. You're excited, you're telling everyone you're setting up shop, and that energy is electric. It's exactly what pulls in your first clients.  Then the calls start coming. One project. Then another. Then another. Before you know it, you've got more clients than you can handle, usually around three or four, and you're maxed out. You're delivering the work. You're also the CEO, the invoicer, the contract writer, the everything.  That's when you hit the tipping point. A contact calls with a new project, and you say no, too busy. Another contact calls a few weeks later, same answer. You don't realise it yet, but you've just burned two bridges with people who came to you offering work.  Then the contracts run out. The clients disappear. You're in famine, reaching out to a network that isn't as receptive as before, because you already turned them down once. So you cast a wider net. You sign clients again. And because you learned from last time, you push yourself to take on one more than you should. The cycle repeats, just with a wider net each round.  This isn't a day in the life of an entrepreneur.    It’s you not having built the capacity to wear and hold the different hats an entrepreneur puts on. And this capacity is a skill that you can build the same way you built your skills as an employee: through practice, over time.  In today's episode, here are the 3 things you'll learn:  1.- Why the feast-famine cycle isn't about talent or demand, it's about capacity.  2.- How to calculate your oversubscribed number, and why you need to cut it in half.  3.- The 3-step system that keeps clients renewing instead of you starting from zero : sign, deliver, and line up your next move before the contract ends.  By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly how many clients you should actually be taking on at once. You'll have a simple, repeatable system for signing clients without burning out or burning bridges.   And you'll understand why the consultants who build sustainable six-figure businesses aren't the ones who say yes to everyone, they're the ones who know their number and stick to it.

  6. Sep 20

    179. What Is Your Wellness Expertise Actually Worth?

    The number one mistake new wellness consultants make?   They price like an employee.  I see this mistake constantly with wellness professionals who go out on their own.   They carry their employee mindset straight into their consulting business. They trade time for money, because that's the only model they've ever known.  Then they compound the problem. They benchmark their price against consultants who've been in the game for decades because they think all their years of expertise entitle them to that same number.  It doesn't work like that. And I know, because I've been there.  What happens next is predictable. The work takes far longer than expected, because they've forgotten something critical: every result they ever delivered in employment was backed by a team. A department. A whole invisible support system doing the heavy lifting alongside them.  On their own, none of that exists. No team. No authority over their client's staff. No one to hand off the P&L or the PowerPoint. Just them, working double the hours, getting resentful, and eventually asking the client to pay more for time that was never agreed to.  The client gets frustrated. The consultant gets burned out. Nobody wins. And it was entirely avoidable.  In today’s episode, we’ll uncover the following three things :  1.- Why thinking like an employee is what hinders many consultants’ growth.  2.- The demonstrable value pricing model I built in my Goldman Sachs days and still use to this day.  3.- Why walking away from a client who doesn't see your value is sometimes the most profitable decision you'll make.  By the end of this episode, you’ll know exactly why hourly pricing is capping your income, and you'll have a framework to price based on the value you create, not the hours you clock.

  7. Sep 13

    178. Financial Chute First. Then Jump

    70% of businesses fail in year one.  Why ? Because there wasn't enough cash in the bank to keep the lights on. Great ideas don't keep a business alive. Cash flow does.  This episode is about the one step most consultants skip, and the reason so many of them don't make it past year three. Note: This is step five, the final episode in my five-part series on how to make money as a wellness consultant. If you haven't listened to Step 1 (One Way Forward), Step 2 (One Thing, Done Brilliantly), Step 3 (Become Your Client's Obvious Choice), or Step 4 (Overdeliver Consistently), start there. This episode is what makes everything you've built in those four steps actually last. Now, back to the episode. I started Spa Balance in December 2007, using my savings as startup capital.  I had clients. I was working hard. They were repeating with me. On paper, it looked like it was working. Then in 2008, Spain slid into an economic crisis that hit rock bottom by 2012. I still had clients, but they'd stopped paying on time, or stopped paying at all.  So my P&L looked healthy. Every invoice I issued sat there as revenue. But there was no cash in my account, because revenue on paper and cash in the bank are not the same thing.  Hence, I had to crawl back into full-time employment just to stay afloat, all while still running my business, still writing my first ebook. That experience taught me two things I've never forgotten: first, the moment a client defaults with their payments to pause works, and second, I was never again going to ask my business to pay for my lifestyle, or to pay to keep its own lights on, before it was strong enough to do so. Even after I'd published a bestselling book, I made the strategic choice to go back into full-time employment again. My business was doing well, but I'd learned my lesson about buffers. And when the pandemic wiped my reserves clean anyway, I built them back up the same way: strategically, deliberately, with my lifestyle funded separately from my business. Phil Knight ran Nike for ten years while working full-time as an accountant. If the founder of Nike needed a safety net for a decade, none of us are exempt from needing one either. In today’s episode, here are the 3 things you’ll learn: 1.- Why revenue and cash flow are not the same thing — and how a healthy-looking P&L can still leave you unable to pay your bills. 2.- How to calculate your essential living number — the minimum you need to cover your household expenses, so your business is never on the hook to feed you before it's ready to. 3.- Why this step comes last, not first — and how the emotional cycle of change explains why so many consultants skip it, right when they need it most.  By the end of this episode, you'll understand why cash flow, not ideas, is what determines whether your consulting business survives past year one.   You'll know how to build a safety net that funds your lifestyle separately from your business — a low-effort side income or strategic employment — so you're never forced to ask your business for money it doesn't have yet.   And you'll see the full five-step arc, start to finish: direction, offer, sales, delivery, and now, the safety net that lets all four of the others actually hold.

  8. Sep 6

    177. Overdeliver Consistently, Each And Every Time

    There are two ways to overdeliver. One leads to burnout. The other leads to repeat business. Most consultants think overdelivering means bending over backwards. They think it means doing extra hours, allowing scope creep, saying yes to things they don't even know how to do. It doesn't. It means something far more strategic, and far less exhausting.   Note: This is step four of my five-step process for making money as a wellness consultant. If you haven't listened to Step 1 (One Way Forward), Step 2 (One Thing, Done Brilliantly), or Step 3 (Become Your Client's Obvious Choice), go back and start there. This episode is what you do once the client has already said yes.   Now, back to the episode. Ten years into business, I had clients I was almost embarrassed to put on my profile. Not because the hotels were bad or the wellness concept was poor. The hotels were great and the concepts were excellent. I would go in and build a hotel a stunning wellness concept, they'd implement it, and I'd move on because my job was done. Except it wasn't done. Because what I hadn’t realised was that solving one problem for a client creates a new one. They now had this beautiful wellness facility and no idea how to run it. No one to manage it. No plan for what happens when the wellness director leaves. This was a new problem, created by solving the first one. For years, I saw that as a failure. I thought, "I didn't really help them." It took me a decade to see it for what it actually was: a golden opportunity, sitting there the whole time, that I walked straight past. Overdelivering isn't about doing more. It's about seeing further. It’s about anticipating the problem your solution creates before your client even knows it's coming, and having the answer ready. In today’s episode, we’ll cover the following 3 things: 1.- Why "bending over backwards" isn't overdelivering — and what to do instead that doesn't burn you out. 2.- The new problems every solution creates — and why spotting them early is what turns a one-time client into a client for years. 3.- How hotel service-recovery thinking applies directly to consulting — preempting glitches before they happen, instead of putting out fires later down the road.  By the end of this episode, you'll understand the real difference between overdelivering and overextending.   You'll know how to look past the problem you were hired to solve and spot the one it creates next, and why that's where your repeat business actually lives.   You'll also see why a high-ticket, low-volume consulting business depends far more on this step than on constantly finding new clients.

See All (184)

About

Get insights firsthand! Join top global wellness expert and author, Sonal Uberoi, as she shares insights from hoteliers all over the world, managing all types of hotels, each with their unique set of challenges (location, owners, regulations, teams, etc.), and learn their wellness in hospitality best practices.

Information