How to Plan a Wellness Trip—From Guinea Pig Rituals to Meditative Hikes

Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

Condé Nast Traveler

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.4 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sound baths. Silent retreats. Cryotherapy. When it comes to wellness, there’s an encyclopedia’s worth of experiences, treatments, and rituals to dip your toe into. But where on earth to start? This week, Lale is joined by three experts—Lydia Bell, Traveller UK’s senior features editor, Yariella Coello, the blogger behind The Beauty Backpacker, and Jen Murphy, a writer who reports regularly on wellness tourism—to demystify the jargon and find out how to start planning your own trip.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and with me on women who travel today are three women who are talking about wellness.
0:12.7	There Lydia Bell, senior features editor at Kondinas Traveler, blogger Yarialla Coelho, who writes the Beauty Backpacker and is based in Hackney in London,
0:22.0	and journalist Jen Murphy, regular traveller contributor and often a reporter on wellness tourism.
0:43.0	So today we're going to talk about all things, retreats, sanctuaries, spa resorts, sweat lodges,
0:48.6	but first I need to admit that I don't really come to wellness very naturally.
0:53.8	The thought of knowing that I have to leave the beach at a set time and go for a massage and then be sort
0:54.4	of trapped in some sort of hotel spa and follow various rules, or at least this is how I perceive
0:59.2	it, seems more stressful than relaxing to me, but I have a feeling that I'm casting a broad
1:05.8	stroke on the wellness industry. Having a vacation to me feels good enough, but I think I'm wrong. I mean,
1:13.0	you've all written about so many transformative places. Could each of you just introduce yourself
1:18.8	and give an example of somewhere that's really stuck with you from a wellness standpoint?
1:23.6	And sorry, Lydia, as the staffer at Condonast Traveler, I'm going to put you on the spot and make you go first.
1:30.2	Okay, hello. So I am the Senior Features Editorial at Condonest Traveler UK. And I also edit the Wellness and Spa Guide, which we published every year.
1:41.3	So in terms of spa wellness experience or wellness experiences,
1:45.6	the one that stands out in my mind as being most memorable would be in the Italian Tyrol. So
1:52.4	you're in Italy, but to all intents and purposes, you're in Austria. There's a spa which is
1:59.1	very Austrian. It's called Piedelhoff. It's essentially a place for
2:03.3	Austrians and Germans to go on holiday, go hiking, go walking. But there's also this incredible
2:09.4	spa there, which is run by an Italian woman called Patricia Bortolin. And she has a completely
2:15.4	different sensibilities. And it's in this incredibly beautiful valley, which is almost has a sort of microclimate,
2:20.5	which is quite Mediterranean.
2:22.1	And she pieces together these amazing holistic practitioners.
	...

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