This Wellness Brand Adds Two City Hotels This Fall. The Ayurveda Stays at the Resorts

Six Senses opens hotels in Milan and Dubai this autumn, following Rome in 2023 and London this spring. That gives a brand built on remote island and jungle resorts four city properties in three years, and the wellness programming inside them looks nothing like what guests find at Six Senses Fiji.

Mark Sands, global vice president of wellness at Six Senses, laid out the split in an interview with Business Traveller. "At our resorts, we are often the destination," he said, describing guests who never leave the property. City hotels get a different toolkit: IV therapy, cryotherapy, flotation pods, hyperbaric chambers and heavy investment in fitness and recovery equipment. The Ayurvedic consultations that anchor the resort programming largely stay at the resorts.

Sands joined Six Senses in 2011 as area director of spas for Thailand and Vietnam and took the global role in 2020. He came from Ananda in the Himalayas, one of the first destination spas to pair five-star hospitality with Ayurvedic, Tibetan and traditional Chinese medicine, and his stated test for any new treatment is whether the evidence holds up. Saunas, he points out, sat in hotels for decades before the longevity research caught up.

What the brand actually sells

Two programs carry most of the weight. Sleep With Six Senses, now more than a decade old, was built with sleep specialist Dr. Michael Breus and pairs a Naturalmat mattress and organic bedding with a complimentary tracker, followed by a review of the guest's metrics. The Female Wellness program, developed with Dr. Mindy Pelz, runs three, five or seven days and combines a wellness screening with fasting and treatments aimed at hormones and metabolism.

Sands spends about a third of his time on staff training, and every employee now gets some exposure to the sleep, nutrition and screening protocols.

The commercial logic is straightforward. McKinsey puts the global wellness market above $2 trillion, and Aman, Accor and Marriott are all pouring money into spas and medical-grade equipment. Six Senses got there early; the question now is whether a brand associated with Kyoto temple grounds and Fijian bays can make the same case in Milan and Dubai.