Sitting down for breakfast with Tammy Pahel, Vice President of Spa and Wellness Operations at the Carillon Miami Wellness Resort (hereafter abbreviated as “the Carillon”), offers nothing short of a world of insight in the vast and restorative power that comprehensive wellness programming can bring to a hotel. Touching on all subject matter from nutrition, sleeptech and advances in fitness through to transformative wellness group retreats, energy healing and the future of the spa industry, two hours fly by before it’s time to head off to experience one of the hotel’s signature touchless therapy circuits.
At the heart of this resort’s story is first and foremost one of helping visitors to Miami as well as the community, wherein the Carillon boats a wide range of amenities for its residents, locals and guests staying anywhere from one night to several weeks. While the focus is on the newest addition to the cadre of wellness features – its touchless therapy equipment – part of what makes this property so special is the variety of ways to move, recharge or just live. Someone with a wellness mindset or looking to discover this blooming world can easily stay here for months and never do the routine twice.
Indeed, with over 70,000 square feet of space devoted to the 22 treatment rooms, a full thermal bathing facility (divided by men and women), a 24/7 fitness center with classes led by buoyantly encouraging instructors, a salon, a gift boutique, the Biostation (a peptide and IV medical clinic) and an alternative medicine center, the Carillon is proof that the wellness craze for hotels is only just getting started.
From what we saw during our stay, though, what matters most are the outcomes from wellness. Boasting the biggest wellness center in the Miami area, the place has become a community filled with fresh, bright faces traversing the corridors, and a youthful vitality exuded by staff and visitors alike. Wellness is, after all, about the personal journey of discovering and being one’s best self – generating wellbeing. It’s a story about people and continuous reinvention, and there’s perhaps no better example of these principles than the Carillon.
Miami’s softer side
In the post-pandemic era, the greater Miami area is booming. Miami Beach thrums with tourists year-round while across the intracoastal in Brickell they can’t build gleaming condominiums and premium office skyscrapers fast enough. Yet moving up the Atlantic Coast, there are numerous other beach communities where the laidback Floridian way of life remains.
Nestled in the quiet, multicultural neighbourhood of North Beach where a quick stroll up Collins Avenue finds one choosing between Argentinian cafés, Brazilian bakeries and archetypal Cuban restaurants, the 90-key Carillon first opened in 1958 – with memorabilia of the launch decorating the walls of the hotel’s signature restaurant, The Strand – and it has reinvented itself many times between now and then. Building on its core brand equity as a sunny abode for family vacationers and Miamians alike, the new focus on touchless wellness is finding a steadfast audience of weekend warrior Miamians and wellness enthusiasts from across the country.
First to note is that the Carillon is primarily a residential apartment complex, with the hotel occupying the central tower, although the wellness facilities, restaurants, pool, courtyard gardens and beach club are all shared. All 90 guest suites devoted hotel guests include kitchenettes and spacious living room areas to accommodate longer stays, both for snowbirds wanting a quiet winter respite directly adjacent to the beach or for people enrolled in a purposeful wellness retreat. For hoteliers, the cardinal term that applies here is length of stay (LOS), with the armada of options offering a strong incentive to stay a few more days or book for longer next time.
Significantly, all suites have Bryte smart beds installed, which allow guests to adjust mattress firmness (each side of the bed independently) while also tracking the guests’ sleep quality. This is but a flavor of the programming downstairs, but it nevertheless reinforces how sleep is such a critical part of one’s overall health. Even today, few hotels with a spa have effectively extended their wellness programs into the rooms through a proper capex into these new bedding technologies.
Understanding the interdependent relationship between sleep and spa has been a key aspect of Pahel’s vision for the Carillon’s approach to wellness. At the helm of the property’s spa operations for over six years, Pahel started our discussion by describing how the Bryte systems give guests a tangible way to see their sleep scores improve over the course of a few nights or a week.
Prior to joining the Carillon team, Pahel’s experience is perhaps the envy of most other spa professionals. She’s held director roles at Caesars Palace, the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa, the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort & Spa, Turnberry Isle Miami, the Henderson Beach Resort and Deer Lake Lodge & Spa.
As Pahel remarked, many people are staying at the Carillon to help them combat specific sleep issues like sleep-onset insomnia, oftentimes partaking in four-night retreats (at a price tag of several thousand dollars or more, mind you) that bring together personalized meal planning, counselling sessions, prescribed recommendations for adjusting one’s daily routine and a series of treatments or touchless therapies down in the spa. Besides how refreshed someone will feel after a few consecutive nights of good rest, having that before-after sleep quality measurement in place from the Bryte system fundamentally gives guests hope to continue on their wellness journeys back at home, and then to return for a follow-up visit in several months or next year.
Touchless therapy circuits
Part of the challenge that many of us face with the word ‘wellness’ is that it’s all-encompassing. Technically, sitting on a quiet park bench and feeding the pigeons can be a form of mindful wellness. Still, it’s the vast diversity of what’s available at the Carillon that allows for a true health transformation to occur and for a real community of positive, likeminded thinkers to form.
On any given day, there are group exercise, personal training and spin classes happening on the third floor while other members are checking in on the fourth floor to use the thermal bathing facilities which include Finnish saunas, a herbal laconium, Jacuzzis, steam rooms, cold rooms, experiential showers and more. But, as aforementioned, a major focus for Pahel during her tenure has been to develop the resort’s touchless therapy selection as an adjunct to its traditional spa offerings in order to enhance the resort’s healing capabilities.
With many of these machines fitting within the category of frequency therapy – ‘freq tech’ as the rhyming nickname these days – the devices use a myriad of wave-based techniques such as infrared, red-light therapy (RLT), pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMF), biofield voltage rebalancing, sound therapy and binaural beats to promote bodily restoration.
As a premier, high-tech wellness destination where even the Miami Heat are regulars, this freq tech is complemented by cryochambers, salt float baths, vibrational therapies, microcirculation boosters and more. With the equipment installed in various treatment rooms next to the massage tables, it gives the Carillon the flexibility to accommodate clients who want either a traditional spa menu offering or a touchless therapy where the practitioner can set the guest up then leave them be for 20-someodd minutes while the machine is active.
With some overlap, the users of these touchless therapy devices represent a different segment of customers than traditional spa goers. Having this variety of services ensures that there’s something for everyone, especially for stressed-out urbanite executives, financiers or technologists in need of a reset who may be apprehensive about getting a massage or facial.
While all of these touchless therapies are available on-demand and are used by residents, local members and hotel guests alike, the real magic happens during the wellness circuits that have been specially crafted by Pahel and her team to target specific ailments by having clients go through a full sequence of four to six therapies over the course of several hours.
For example, the high-tech Sleep Well Circuit starts with a Biocharger session, then time on an infrared bed, then a multisensorial V.E.M.I. (short for vibroacoustic, electro, magnetic, infrared) and finally a Somadome, together working to restore proper sleep patterning by correcting the body’s biofield voltage, releasing toxins through vibrating the body, activating subcutaneous mitochondria for balanced energy levels and releasing anxiety via nerve entrainment respectively. Other circuits using different equipment and sequencing include Better Your Back, Detoxification & Optimal Weight Management, Couples Wellness and Recovery & Pain Management.
The benefits of going touchless
Not only are these tools effective but for the bean counters out there the word ‘touchless’ implies more treatments without proportional increases to labor requirements. The same practitioner who supervises one guest at the start of their sequence can also help other clients or members while that guest is in session. Even with such a gargantuan floor area devoted to wellness, such therapies are nevertheless pivotal for maximizing revenue on a per-treatment-room basis.
Then to complement all these futuristic circuits is the Biostation across the main reception area, which offers medical consultations with a menu of vitamin intravenous or intramuscular drips, peptides and hormone replacement therapies. Below the Biostation are offices focusing on alternative medicine treatments such as reiki, sound healing or appointments with a hypnotherapist. One can easily spend several days combining these therapies with a touchless wellness circuit or two.
All told, there are numerous reasons to visit, revisit or extend your stay (importantly, driving up LOS). Melding together the high tech with the high touch, the Carillon represents the future of hotel wellness and preventative health practices inside a cozy resort setting. As many of these advanced machines are quite expensive in terms of upfront costs, it takes a true champion of wellness to usher in this vision, and Pahel’s accomplishments offer a shining example of how to reinvent a property into a world leader of wellness with a highly diversified source of revenues.
