What is “sleep tourism”? The rise of a $600 billion industry, explained

Sleep can feel like a precious commodity in my home.

My wife has had her fair share of insomnia. Across the hall is our one-and-a-half-year-old… well, a one-and-a-half-year-old. The days of waking up regularly, two to three times a night, have hardly faded. Plus, all it takes is one daycare illness to take us right back. I’m a happy-to-be-procrastinating kind of guy. In other words, we could all use a little more sleep.

While the benefits of a full night’s sleep are well documentedcan those good Z’s be hard to come by. This has led to parental burnout, workplace burnoutand even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared insufficient sleep a public health epidemic. Today, the agency says about one-third of American adults and children not getting enough sleep.

Now, a growing number of Americans go on vacation with one goal in mind: a good night’s sleep. According to a recent travel trend report“sleeping” now trumps shopping, nightlife, and wildlife viewing as American travelers’ top vacation activity.

Globally, luxury hotels are meeting their demand by offering luxury sleep packages designed hand-in-hand with sleep scientists that promise a scientifically curated night of relaxation. This has spawned a global sleep tourism industry worth around $600 billion.

Dr. Matthew Walker, a world-renowned sleep researcher and director of the Sleep Innovation Laboratories at the UT Dallas Center for BrainHealth, partnered with luxury hotel chain Equinox Hotels to design what they call their “Sleep Lab.” It’s a nearly $2,000-a-night room that’s completely optimized and dedicated to getting guests to sleep.

“It’s a whole thermal and sensory ballet, all designed around the biology of what your body needs,” Walker told me.

We’ve covered just about everything related to our health, from how many steps you take in a given week to what your heart rate says about your stress levels and, of course, how well you sleep at night. This data created new ways to try to optimize even the parts of life that are supposed to be relaxing.

So I was curious to interrogate sleep tourism and the luxury gamification of sleep. Can you unlock ways to sleep better all the time on a sleepover?

I head to Equinox Hotels’ Sleep Lab for a night with a sleep mask and reporter’s notebook in hand. I spoke with Noel King, co-host of the Today, explained podcastabout the trip and my takeaways.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained where you get podcasts including Apple Podcasts, Pandoraand Spotify.

So the people who do marketing have marketed a solution to burnout, a sexy new solution, and the sexy new solution is: Go to sleep.

Indeed. Hotels are now offering these luxury sleepovers: tailor-made packages designed for sleepovers, the growing number of people who say they go on vacation not to go shopping or see wildlife, but just to catch some Zs.

Makes sense to me, although I’ve always thought about catching some Z’s as part of the holidays. Are you telling me that they say this is something new?

Yes, sleeping on vacation has been around for as long as vacations have existed.

But these new things are specific hotel packages designed to be all about sleep. And that’s actually the birth of this new global sleep tourism industry that’s worth about $600 billion.

$600 billion is a lot of money.

Part of that is because they offer these luxurious sleep packages designed hand-in-hand with sleep scientists. So now we have sleepover tourism options in Fiji, Portugal, Hawaii.

I couldn’t make it to Fiji myself, but I did go to one in New York City, where I live, at Equinox Hotels, the luxury hotel cousin of the luxury gym.

They are ready, willing and able to sell you a package to help you sleep. As both an intrepid sleep reporter and a sleep-deprived dad, I wanted to understand the mechanics of this and see if being a sleep tourist could unlock better ways to sleep in general. Like, can I take any of my tourism home?

So I embarked on my sleep journey in three legs. In the first leg I asked: Can I, sleeping tourist, get as relaxed as humanly possible?

So I hit the Equinox spa to get what they call a sleep IV. There I am sitting by a window, classical music wafting through the air, sipping my lemon water, about to pump myself full of this bright yellow Gatorade-looking cocktail of things like magnesium, taurine, vitamin C, B, zinc. All these things, they said, were supposed to prepare my body for good sleep.

ONAn hour later, while I was hanging out in the sauna, I felt pretty sunken. But I knew I couldn’t stop yet. I had more leisure to do.

Which brings us to leg two of my journey. Now that I had found relaxation, could I make the most of it?

So I did this thing called the Golf Table. It is marketed as a way to get the equivalent of three hours of sleep in just 30 minutes. You basically lay on this water bed under a weighted blanket and listen to these sounds that are supposed to help slow your brain down.

To me it just sounded like this surrounding seascape. And being the nerd that I am, rather than sleeping I was focused on the sound design of it all, wave after wave after wave.

Petrus, you will remember that the purpose of this was to get some sleep. Did any sleep actually happen?

Yes, the sleeping part of the trip. I wanted to see if the tools of science could help with that. So I enrolled in what they call their Sleep Lab.

It is a hotel room that promises a complete scientifically adapted premium sleep experience.

It has an in-room bar. But instead of just Diet Cokes and chips, it’s full of supplements and juices and patches to help you sleep. It has a smart mattress that adjusts things for you overnight.

And it’s equipped with all these activities and exercises that help you sleep well. So I set out to do every single thing they recommended.

There were breathing exercises, color therapy, meditations, breathing, body work yoga stretches, more breathing exercises, drinking bedtime tea, drinking cherry juice to get extra melatonin, a steam shower…

Almost two hours of activities later, I was finally done. And the room goes to sleep too. The shades fall automatically, the room cools, the mattress does too, and then darkness.

They claim that it is scientific. Scientifically, what happened to all this?

To find out, I spoke with dr. Matt Walker, a professor of neuroscience and biomedical engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, spoke. Now, this man is the face of sleep in America today. He teaches the literal MasterClass on how to sleep. And he helped design this room.

To sleep, your body has to do a bit of dancing, it seems. Matt tells me temperature is a big part of it. You need to lower your brain and body temperature to fall asleep and then stay asleep. And then to wake up, your body has to do that whole dance again, but in reverse.

And the waking up… was honestly really nice.

The room came alive around me. The room and mattress were heated.

The shades lifted. These ambient alarm sounds floated through the air. And there I was, soft, light, pleasant feelings all around.

So you did it. You must sleep. Did you wake up rested?

I kind of wish I had one of those video game health (bars) floating above my head so I could see where my levels actually were. It was a lot of work to go to bed. But once I woke up, I felt pretty good.

One thing that strikes me at the moment is that none of these sound particularly cheap. How much did it cost you?

Well, to get one of these rooms, depending on how far in advance you book, it will cost you around $2000 a night.

And that’s just for the room, not even the Gatorade-stained IV I did.

Okay, you and I talked about this. I am not a sound sleeper. What are the lessons for those of us who weren’t lucky enough to have this experience with you? Give me some tips.

Sure, sure. I think there are things like keeping your temperature cool or taking a hot bath or shower before going to bed, to keep things as dark as possible. You can do this even if you are not on a sleeping holiday. Another thing – doing all those sleep activities kept me off my phone before bed and it’s pretty good for sleeping too.

But I actually asked Matt if it could help someone like you who has severe insomnia. And he says a sleepover, even in his carefully designed lab, isn’t necessarily going to change things.

I trust him, but I will tell you that even if I had $2,000 a night to spend on this, I wouldn’t do it. I am too skeptical.

However, you said it’s a $600 billion industry, which means a lot of people are willing to spend the two grand a night. What do you think this tells us about where we are at the moment?

As I looked at all the sleep tourism, sometimes there was more branding than substance. You’ll see a place brag about their sleep tourism option on their website, and then I’ll go check and they’ll offer you a sleep mask and a comfy pillow, but not necessarily something that looks super scientific.

In general, we are at a moment where we think about sleep a little differently than we did in the past. The grindset mindset is out. Spoil yourself. Take care of yourself. It’s in. Sleepmaxing is a thing that is all over TikTok with people giving tips on how to break your sleep.

Did you take anything from the hotel? The stuff they taught you, did you continue to do any of it?

That’s kind of what I went looking for. Can I take any of these home as a tourist? Like, I don’t have a fancy bed – but I can breathe at home, or try to keep my room cool.

But all those exercises they urged me to do in that room are just not realistic to do all the time. Because life is busy, it’s messy, it’s full of friction and challenges – things that aren’t good for sleep, but are part of a full life.