We’ve all experienced stress while travelling. Delayed flights, long car drives, heavy luggage... Fortunately, yoga and other wellness activities are the perfect way for guests to alleviate tension before or after a long journey, loosen up any niggles or aches and reset.

Read on to find out how you can best use virtual yoga classes to help your guests unwind.

 

How do yoga classes release stress?

Yoga, meditation, and breathing exercises are excellent ways to help guests reduce stress, replenish energy, and enhance their overall well-being.

Yoga encourages mental and physical relaxation, with postures that promote flexibility, relieve tension, and alleviate pain. It also promotes the release of mood-boosting endorphins, which are the feel-good hormones that can positively affect how you handle stress.

As guests practice, they should be able to feel at one with their body, thoughts, and feelings, and find it easier to let go of travel tension.

But how do you go about making sure your guests can access a relaxing yoga class in a way that makes them comfortable and at a time that suits them?

 

Best ways to offer virtual yoga classes to promote relaxation

The world of virtual wellness has opened so many avenues for travellers to access their wellness routines when on the move. To make the experience as simple and relaxing as possible, consider offering a few of the options below.

Independent or group virtual yoga classes

Not everyone is comfortable exercising in company; some prefer solo relaxation over group settings. Offering your guests a variety of ways to experience your virtual yoga classes means they can choose an option that they are comfortable with.

Hotels can offer pre-scheduled wellness classes in a studio, through their in-room tv or via an app. Making all these options available means you cater to all guests, regardless of their preference.

24/7 access

Hotels welcome visitors from all corners of the globe. Whether you have guests arriving late after a long journey, or they are struggling to sleep due to jetlag, offering 24/7 access to a virtual wellness platform can help them relax and recover more quickly.

Make choosing a class simple

We’ve all spent hours scrolling through our TV streaming service trying to find something we want to watch, but the choice can be overwhelming. The same can apply to virtual wellness. To avoid a frustrating search, offer your guests a carefully curated selection of premium classes.

With Earth+Sky, you can be sure that every one of our classes has been produced to the highest quality, meaning an exceptional experience every time. And with just over 40 classes there’s a wide, but not overwhelming, variety of options.

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On-demand or scheduled classes?

If you have a studio at your hotel, you can make classes available on a scheduled timetable or through an on-demand platform. Both options have their advantages.

On-demand allows your guests to select classes, normally via a wall-mounted tablet. This means they have the flexibility to choose the class they want at a time that suits them. However, this can sometimes mean that the studio could be occupied when a guest goes to use it.

Offering a scheduled timetable combined with on-demand services creates the perfect balance between reliability and flexibility. It means guests don’t need to think about what class to select and can simply head to the studio at the right time.

To ensure you capture the needs of all your guests, consider offering a blended timetable, with a few scheduled classes throughout the day, and on-demand blocks in-between.

Give your guests everything they need

Though yoga can be performed with nothing but floorspace, it’s better done with a few accessories, the bare minimum being a yoga mat. But mats are reasonably bulky things to transport, especially when flying.

Consider providing mats, blocks, and blankets to elevate your virtual yoga classes. If offering an in-room option, a real perk for the guests would be to find everything they need right there in the room when they arrive or provided as part of a bespoke check-in service to interested guests.

Extend the experience

Let your guests start their wind-down before they even set foot in your hotel using a virtual wellness app.

Through pre-arrival communication, you can give your guests access to a platform where they can start their wellness journey at a time that suits them from any digital device. Bringing their wellbeing into the foreground beyond their physical stay will help build excitement and elevate their experience to a whole new level.

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One or a mix of a few of these methods can help you create the perfect solution to offer your guests virtual wellness classes.

If you are interested in further exploring how virtual wellness classes can enhance your guest experience, get in touch with our team today. We are experts in crafting truly outstanding virtual experiences and work with you from concept to delivery to capture your every need.

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Yoga could play a greater part in protecting and promoting mental health.

For thousands of years, yoga has been used to maintain good mental and physical health. In our high-stress, always-on world, the practice is more relevant than ever.

The King’s Fund and the British Centre for Mental Health both state that poor mental health has been a major factor in the 12-18% rise in NHS expenditure annually on treating and managing long-term conditions. It’s a significant figure in a health service that is already straining to cope, and many scientists are quoting yoga as being a solution to dealing with the problem.

Here are some of the mental benefits of practising yoga:

Yoga relieves stress and tension
Stress and mental health account for around half of all sick days taken from work. It is detrimental to employees’ personal performance and also catastrophic for business owners. Yoga’s combination of breath, meditation and body work makes it a great way to soothe the mind and dispel tension. Find out more about our Meditation & Relaxation collection here.

Yoga helps with anxiety and depression
According to a Harvard University article, yoga is proven to be helpful in reducing anxiety and depression. Through treating the spirit and the mind through activities such as relaxation, meditation, deep breathing and exercise, yoga helps regulate the stress response system, lowers blood pressure and heart rate, and produces seratonin, the feel-good hormone. Read more about Earth+Sky’s Zen Flow classes here.

Yoga boosts memory and improves concentration
According to a recent study by University of Illinois, yoga is ideal for improving mental focus through quieting the fluctuations of the mind; several brain areas benefit from yoga, including those that control memory, decision-making and planning.

Yoga reduces the effects of traumatic experiences
People who suffer from anxiety developed after traumatic events can benefit from yoga practice, according to a three-year study of yoga and trauma at the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute. Gentle yoga leads to a significant reduction in symptoms, calming intrusive thoughts and reconnecting people to their bodies.

Yoga improves symptoms of dementia
Research from the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA states that yoga and meditation may help the brain form new connections and improve the quality of life of dementia patients. The breathing, movement, postures and concentration that go into yoga practice use different parts of the brain and can actually improve brain structure and function in the elderly. Some of our gentler classes are ideal for older people.

At Earth+Sky, we believe in that yoga could become one of the staple strategies in protecting and restoring mental health.