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Inside the $600 billion “sleep tourism” industry

I went to a $2,000 hotel and all I got was this really good night of sleep.

Sleep can feel like a precious commodity in my household.

My wife has had her fair share of insomnia. Across the hall, our one-and-a-half-year-old is…well, a one-and-a-half-year-old. The days of regular, two to three times a night wake-ups have barely faded. Plus, all it takes is one daycare sickness to take us right back. I’m a stay-up-too-late procrastinating kind of guy. In other words, we all could use a bit more sleep.

While the benefits of a full night’s sleep have been well-documented, those good Zs can be hard to come by. It’s led to parental burnout, workplace burnout, and even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declaring insufficient sleep a public health epidemic. Today, the agency says about one-third of US adults and children don’t get enough sleep.

Can’t sleep? It’s not totally your fault.

Now, a growing number of Americans are heading out on vacation with one goal: a great night of sleep. According to a recent travel trends report, “sleeping” now outranks shopping, nightlife, and seeing wildlife as US travelers’ main vacation activity.

Globally, luxury hotels are meeting their demand by offering high-end luxury sleep packages designed hand-in-hand with sleep scientists that promise a scientifically curated night of relaxation. It’s birthed 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 the luxury hotel chain Equinox Hotels to design what they call their “Sleep Lab.” It’s a nearly $2,000-per-night room entirely optimized and dedicated to getting guests to sleep.

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

We’ve already gamified just about everything with 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 has created new ways to try to optimize even the parts of life that are supposed to be relaxing.

I covered my body in health trackers for 6 months. It ruined my life.

So I was curious to interrogate sleep tourism and the luxury gamification of sleep. Could going on a sleep vacation unlock ways to sleep better all of the time?

I set off into Equinox Hotels’ Sleep Lab for a night with a sleep mask and reporter’s notebook in hand. I........

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