Taking the guest perspective: insights from The Well

To step into The Well, located just outside Oslo in Norway, is to step into a rhythm.

It’s a rhythm of heat and stillness, movement and pause, and quiet transitions between spaces that seem to anticipate you before you arrive. The Well offers not a sequence of services, but an unfolding – one shaped as much by choice as by space design.

Guests can move socially or silently, drift between ritual and spontaneity, linger in conversation or retreat into solitude.

The experience does not instruct, it invites. In doing so it reveals something increasingly rare in the wellness landscape: a sense of personal authorship over one’s own spa journey.

Designing for whom instead of what

In today’s wellness industry, we have become highly fluent in the language of performance, of RevPAR, utilisation, yield and occupancy. While these are necessary markers of business maturity, in optimising the system we risk designing around the guest, rather than from within their experience.

Somewhere along the way, the guest has become secondary to the system.

This is where an Experience Design perspective can begin to shift the lens. A human-centred discipline, it reorders the focus from what is built to how it is lived and for whom.

Experience Design asks: how does the guest feel as they move through the space? Where do they hesitate, where do they linger, what do they remember? It is centred around emotion, agency and meaning.

How do guests wants to feel?

The Well opened in 2015 as the largest spa in the Nordics. By 2021, it included Scandinavia’s largest spa hotel, shifting to a multiple experience destination.

Rooted in its founder, Stein Erik Hagen’s passion for sauna culture, art and holistic wellbeing, the space reflects an intuitive understanding of how people want to feel.

It embodies the power of vision-led creation, evolving into what resonates deeply with the guest. This outcome is difficult to achieve and one that has likely been shaped through years of continuous iteration.

“We are highly agile and put the guest first, continuously adapting our product to meet their needs and preferences,” explains CMO, Ingrid Guklaker.

For the industry, this raises an important point of reflection.

Wellness has long been shaped by built-environment disciplines like architecture and interior design, which define space, flow and function.

They create the physical stage upon which wellness unfolds but they don’t actually take the perspective of the human moving through that form and what it feels like to them.

In industries such as aviation, retail and digital platforms, this distinction has become foundational. Experience is not layered onto the product—it is the product itself.

In wellness, the picture is more fluid. While elements of the Experience Design approach are certainly present across the spa landscape, it is less frequently applied as a cohesive, end-to-end discipline across the full guest journey.

The guest perspective first

Much of the industry still operates within a structured flow: arrival, treatment, relaxation, departure. It’s logical, efficient and often limiting.

At The Well, the presence of choice defines the experience. The journey expands and becomes less about moving through space and more about inhabiting it.

This extends into food and beverage, where the offering reflects a contemporary understanding of wellbeing, where experiences nourish without diminishing pleasure.

The Well represents a great example of how vision-led creation has resulted in a human-centred experience, which aligns closely with the principles of Experience Design.

Optimising the business of wellness

As the industry evolves, there is an opportunity to more intentionally integrate Experience Design, working alongside wellness developers, creatives and architects to intentionally and co-creatively design the guest experience.

The result is a harmonious pairing of inspiring concepts, beautiful spaces and meaningful visits for guests.

Ultimately, wellness is delivered firstly by what is felt. By shifting our perspective, we may find that the most powerful innovation is more about immersing ourselves in the guest lived experience rather ideating what it might be.

Until we have integrated this point, we will continue to optimise the business of wellness, while only partially realising its full potential.

Alina M Hernandez is a wellness industry thought leader and Experience Architect specialising in human-centric systems. She is founder of the Wellness Innovation Hub and co-chair of the Global Wellness Institute’s Mental Wellness Initiative.

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