Within the $6.3 trillion world of wellness, catering to ladies is the lowest-hanging fruit on the tree. But ladies’s wellness is an space that’s traditionally been underfunded and underserved. Within the U.S., ladies had been not often included in medical trials earlier than 1993, and in 2020, solely 5% of world analysis and growth funding was allotted to ladies’s well being analysis. Even spokespeople for the World Wellness Institute, the biggest analysis group devoted to monitoring the trade, acknowledge their failure to gather knowledge on what ladies want or need from the wellness area; they are saying they’ve discovered it extra logical to give attention to health and longevity previously.
Enter Canyon Ranch, the OG of American wellness retreats, based in 1979. In September 2026, it plans to unveil its third location on the outskirts of Austin, an formidable 600-acre ranch whose major focus will likely be ladies’s wellness.
Two-thirds of the model’s company are ladies, says Chief Government Officer Mark Rivers, referring to his current resorts in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Tucson, Arizona. But that very same demographic, he says, “is misunderstood and swallowed basically well being care.”
By focusing virtually solely on rest and wonder, yoga retreats and boot camps, the spa industrial complicated is lacking an enormous a part of what ladies care about: the physiological adjustments ladies face in several phases of their life. It’s a spot that firms reminiscent of Canyon Ranch have been racing to handle in recent times as individuals’s curiosity in wellness — and willingness to spend money on it — has skyrocketed. So far, their efforts have sometimes manifested because the occasional remedy or themed retreat; there nonetheless isn’t a single wellness resort making ladies’s well being their calling card.
The very signs that ladies’s wellness retreats handle — sizzling flashes, vaginal dryness, hair loss — have lengthy felt too taboo to call out loud, a lot much less placed on a marquee. However currently the signs of perimenopause and menopause have develop into buzzy speak present fodder and the topics of bestselling books. Everybody from Oprah and Drew Barrymore to Michelle Obama and Naomi Watts, who has her personal menopause well being product line, is now brazenly speaking concerning the stage in a lady’s life that for many years was vaguely known as “the change.”
By 2030 the world inhabitants of menopausal and postmenopausal ladies is projected to extend 9%, to 1.2 billion, with a forecasted market dimension of $24.4 billion. Spas must cater to this highly effective market or threat getting left behind. It’s no surprise that wellness trade pioneers together with SHA Wellness in Mexico and Spain, Ananda within the Himalayas, and Kamalaya resort in Koh Samui, Thailand, now supply packages to handle fertility, pelvic ground dysfunction and extra. And the rising discourse round these points for ladies has made it simpler for males to confess to comparable considerations too.
“The rise in consciousness across the gender well being hole — notably the dearth of persistent knowledge on feminine hormones and well being—has helped normalize conversations that had been lengthy overdue,” says Anna Bjurstam, head of wellness at Six Senses Lodges Resorts Spas, which earlier this yr launched a feminine wellness pilot program in partnership with ladies’s well being professional Dr. Mindy Pelz. “Let’s face it, the wellness trade has traditionally centered on weight reduction and aesthetics. However ladies wish to really feel good, not simply look good. What we’re seeing now could be a shift towards empowerment, schooling and vitality.”
Canyon Ranch’s Rivers claims that his resort, nevertheless, would be the trade’s first devoted ladies’s wellness observe. “There’s a whole lot of noise within the area, however we’re really investing in it,” he tells Bloomberg Information. To wit, Canyon Ranch Austin is an roughly $122 million funding — of which $50 million will likely be dedicated to the biggest spa in Texas, clocking in at 40,000 sq. ft with 37 remedy rooms.
When Canyon Ranch opened in Tucson within the ’70s, it was a departure from the period’s fashionable, weight-loss-focused “fats farms.” From the beginning, the model labored with nutritionist and health consultants to supply a lifestyle-driven method to well-being. “We’re not a hospital or medical clinic,” Rivers says. “We’re a resort centered on well being as a life-style selection.”
It’s additionally a world chief for all issues longevity. Since its inception, the model says it’s welcomed 1 million company and curated a crew of board-certified medical medical doctors together with Jennifer Wagner, a medical adviser to the U.S. Olympic Committee, and Richard Carmona, former U.S. surgeon basic.
“If ladies have been short-sold by the medical world, I additionally really feel like they’ve been getting short-sold by the wellness area,” says Beth McGroarty, director of analysis for the World Wellness Institute, who has no affiliation with Canyon Ranch’s forthcoming resort however considers it to be groundbreaking in its ambitions. “We immediately noticed all of those menopause packages, however many are rooted in pampering, group and celebrity-driven dietary supplements. Canyon Ranch is including the medical piece.”
Though Austin will give attention to ladies’s well being, Tucson will likely be thought-about Canyon Ranch’s hub for all issues longevity and the Lenox location, in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains, will deal with burnout. Stays on the Austin outpost will likely be priced from $1,400 per particular person, per evening—together with pickleball clinics, infrared sauna periods and wine-paired tasting menus. (That value is about $200 extra per evening than its siblings cost, and better but than its international opponents, although Canyon Ranch charges cowl plenty of lessons and packages that different wellness resorts cost for à la carte.)
Canyon Ranch Austin is the primary resort the corporate is constructing from scratch; the others fill historic, retrofitted buildings. Situated rather less than an hour from downtown in rural-feeling Spicewood, the venture is being designed by award-winning structure agency Lake Flato. It should have 141 resort rooms, 134 residences, 6 racquet sports activities courts, 2 swimming pools and an outside cooking studio centered round grilling. The onsite feminine well being facility, referred to as the Ladies’s Collective at Canyon Ranch Austin, will handle the evolving wants of ladies from their 30s onward; it can cowl a variety of well being considerations together with sleep, diet, postpartum despair and midlife magnificence.
Males will likely be welcome too. Blood work, bone density scans, sleep screenings and different medical checks will all be beneficial or prescribed based on gender, age and individualized well being considerations; the identical will apply to the health choices.
In a state that so closely polices fertility drugs, Canyon Ranch has determined to not embody reproductive well being in its choices and won’t be staffed with OB-GYNs. However the model’s different properties have a high-volume of babymooners, and Rivers says the Austin location will supply prenatal massages and pre- and postbirth physique work. Prescription-based hormone alternative remedy may even be accessible.
That’s to not say that magnificence will likely be an afterthought. Hair thinning and pores and skin elasticity are examples that magnificence and ladies’s wellness go hand in hand, Rivers argues, and says that the spa will likely be ready to cope with these subjects holistically.
The intention can be to offer company instruments and methods that they will carry house, however Canyon Ranch additionally says it hopes that some individuals will wish to dwell the Canyon Ranch life for good. Like lots of its friends, it’s at the moment providing two- and three-bedroom houses on the market, from $3.4 million, alongside the brand new Austin resort. Every residence is kitted out with wellness options reminiscent of saunas, chilly plunges, restoration lockers stocked with massages weapons and foam rollers, and stargazing perches with NASA-grade telescopes — plus complimentary entry to the spa and the resort’s 35-plus each day actions.
That, in some methods, paints one other model of the way forward for wellness resorts, through which individuals not trip to determine wholesome habits however relocate for them. On the very least, it’s a secondary technique that performs to both gender.
©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Go to bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company, LLC.
