Imagine arriving at your hotel after a long flight and being greeted by your own personal sleep butler. They present you with a pillow menu and invite you to a sleep meditation session later that day. You unpack in a room kitted with an AI-powered smart bed, blackout shades, blue light-blocking glasses and weighted blankets.
Holidays are traditionally for activities or sightseeing—eating Parisian pastry under the Eiffel tower, ice skating at New York City's Rockefeller Center, lying by the pool in Bali or sipping limoncello in Sicily. But " sleep tourism " offers vacations for the sole purpose of getting good sleep. The emerging trend extends out of the global wellness tourism industry—reportedly worth more than US$800 billion globally (A$1.
2 trillion) and expected to boom . Luxurious sleep retreats and sleep suites at hotels are popping up all over the world for tourists to get some much-needed rest, relaxation and recovery. But do you really need to leave home for some shuteye? The rise of sleep tourism may be a sign of just how chronically sleep deprived we all are.
In Australia more than one-third of adults are not achieving the recommended 7–9 hours of sleep per night, and the estimated cost of this inadequate sleep is A$45 billion each year. Inadequate sleep is linked to long-term health problems including poor mental health, heart disease, metabolic disease and deaths from any cause. Many of the sleep services available in the sleep tourism industry aim to optimi.