Spend a few nights at almost any upscale hotel today, and you will find a wellness menu. Breathwork sessions. Adaptogen lattes. Sleep coaches. Gut-health menus. The terminology is sophisticated, the price points are high, and the intent seems genuine. Yet according to Bryan Hoare, an exercise physiologist with four decades of experience working across more than 25 countries, most of it misses the point entirely.
Bryan has spent his career building wellness programs for some of the world’s most respected hospitality brands, including his recent collaboration with Oberoi Hotels and Resorts to design their ASMI wellness model in India. He is not opposed to innovation. But he has watched the hospitality industry overcomplicate wellness in ways that ultimately undermine it, and he has a clear view of where brands go wrong and what doing it right actually requires.
The Core Problem: Authenticity
The wellness industry has roots going back to the 1970s, when physician Jack Travis developed the idea of a continuum from illness to genuine well-being. The concept was straightforward: eating well, moving regularly, sleeping enough, and finding meaning in life. What made it compelling was also what made it simple.
Hotels, Bryan argues, arrived late to wellness and tried to compensate by making things more elaborate. The competitive instinct pushed brands to differentiate through complexity, new modalities, exotic treatments, and proprietary terminology, rather than through depth of execution.
“The core principles of health and well-being are straightforward and have been understood for decades. Hotels overcomplicate wellness to create a competitive advantage. In doing so, they often end up disseminating misinformation.”
That instinct toward complexity is understandable. But it creates a real problem. Guests who experience a wellness program built on shaky foundations eventually notice. And when a brand stakes its equity on wellness claims it cannot substantiate, the reputational risk is significant.
What the ASMI Model Gets Right
Bryan’s work with Oberoi produced something different. ASMI, a Sanskrit word meaning ‘I am’, was designed around the phrase ‘I am my choices.’ The philosophy centers on personal agency: the idea that wellness is not something a hotel delivers to a guest, but something a guest is empowered to practice during their stay.
The model organizes around five disciplines: movement, nutrition, bodywork, breathwork, and mindfulness. These are not novel categories. What makes ASMI work is the rigor behind it, evidence-based protocols, trained staff, and a structure that scales consistently across Oberoi’s different properties while adapting to local context.
A program designed for a Himalayan retreat, for instance, might incorporate intensive breathwork tied to altitude and mountain environment. The same framework applied to an urban property in Delhi would take a different form. The principles remain constant; the expression changes.
From a commercial standpoint, ASMI also solved a practical problem. By structuring wellness as pre-purchasable packages, Oberoi created a revenue stream that could be modeled, tracked, and improved, turning wellness from a soft amenity into a genuine business line that strengthens brand equity.
The Biopsychosocial Framework
One of Bryan’s core frameworks is what he calls the biopsychosocial model of wellness, an integrated view that takes in biological health, psychological state, and social connection together. These three dimensions are not independent. They reinforce each other constantly.
Biological health, what you eat, how you sleep, and how much you move directly affect your capacity to manage stress and maintain emotional stability. Strong social connections and a sense of meaning in life, in turn, affect biological markers like cortisol levels, sleep quality, and immune function. Treating any one of these in isolation, Bryan argues, is incomplete.
“Maintaining good biological health enables you to better manage life’s stresses. But if you focus only on the biochemistry and ignore meaning and community, you have missed most of what actually drives well-being.”
For brands entering the wellness space, this has a direct implication. A program that addresses only one dimension, say, nutrition or fitness, is easier to build and market, but it delivers less value and is more vulnerable to competitive substitution. A program that addresses all three creates something harder to replicate.
Technology: A Tool, Not a Strategy
Bryan is not skeptical of technology in wellness; he tracks his own health obsessively and has seen firsthand how a medical-grade wearable accurately detected a serious cardiac event, providing doctors with data that shaped his care. But he draws a sharp distinction between technology as a tool and technology as a strategy.
Consumer wearables like the Apple Watch provide useful baselines. Heart rate variability, the variation in time between heartbeats, is, in his view, the single most important metric a person can track as a general indicator of overall health and nervous system function. HRV is best measured during sleep, and trends over time matter more than any single reading.
The risk, Bryan notes, is not in the data itself but in how people interpret it. Constant monitoring without context can produce anxiety rather than insight. The question any wellness program should ask is not what technology can we include, but what information will genuinely change behavior for the better?
Looking forward, Bryan anticipates a significant expansion of integrated health tracking, continuous glucose monitoring, implantable sensors, and AI-powered interpretation layers. But he is clear that the value of these tools depends on whether they serve fundamental human needs or simply add noise.
What Companies Entering Wellness Should Actually Do
For brands considering a move into wellness or longevity, Bryan offers a clear starting framework. The first step is to validate your model against the full biopsychosocial system, biochemistry, psychology, cognition, behavior, and social connection. You do not have to address all of it. But you need to understand where you are playing and why.
Focus matters more than breadth. A company that picks one or two dimensions and executes them with real depth, backed by evidence, delivered by trained practitioners, built into the guest experience rather than bolted on, will outperform a company that tries to cover everything superficially. Bryan cites a recovery-focused concept built around breathwork and thermal therapy as an example of what focused, scalable positioning can look like.
Scalability itself requires a different kind of thinking. A wellness program has to be replicable, not identical across every property, but consistent in its principles and quality of delivery. That means investing in staff training, in protocols that can be documented and taught, and in measurement systems that track whether the program is actually working.
The commercial opportunity is real. But the brands that will capture it are those that treat wellness as a discipline rather than a differentiator, that build their programs on evidence, train people to deliver them properly, and resist the temptation to overclaim what they offer.
“Brands need to be integral with their creations and share valid truths. Dishonesty, even the soft kind that overpromises and underdelivers, leads to significant losses. Both in guest trust and in brand equity.”
The Deeper Question
Somewhere in the conversation, Bryan quotes Viktor Frankl: ‘A man who has a why can deal with any how.’ It is a line from Man’s Search for Meaning, and Bryan applies it directly to wellness strategy.
The brands that will succeed in this space are not the ones with the most elaborate menus or the most advanced technology. They are the ones that give guests something that actually matters, a reason to feel better, a practice they can take home, a sense of connection to something larger than a treatment room.
That is what authentic wellness looks like. And according to Bryan Hoare, it has not changed much since the 1970s.