Hotel Belmar’s new forest-inspired turndown ritual is one of the more considered responses to sleep tourism, the fastest-growing segment of wellness travel.
Hotel Belmar in Monteverde’s cloud forest doesn’t have televisions or air conditioning. Its 26 rooms are built from sustainably sourced timber, ventilated naturally and designed to make guests progressively more aware of the light, breeze and sound of the surrounding forest. It is, in other words, already doing most of the work that sleep requires before a guest even closes their eyes.
Which makes the property’s new Sleep Ritual a natural extension rather than a bolted-on wellness product. The turndown ritual, which was introduced this spring, invites a gentle transition into evening through subtle sensory elements and audio-guided meditations drawn from the rhythms of the cloud forest itself. Guests can engage with it as much or as quietly as they wish. There is no instruction, no expectation, no programme to complete.
That restraint is what distinguishes the best of what is becoming one of hospitality’s most significant trends. Sleep tourism: travel planned specifically around rest and recovery, is now identified by the Global Wellness Institute as a defining category of 2026, with the worldwide market estimated at over $690bn.
Hotels from Six Senses to London’s Kimpton Fitzroy are developing dedicated sleep programmes, and a 2024 survey found that 91% of frequent travellers will pay more for accommodation that actively improves their sleep.
The risk, as with most wellness trends that reach scale, is that the response becomes as restless as the problem. Smart mattresses, biometric tracking, circadian lighting systems all of it is useful, but none of it sufficient on its own.
What Hotel Belmar understands, and what its Sleep Ritual reflects, is that the conditions for rest are environmental and attitudinal before they are technological. A 26-room family-owned hotel in a cloud forest, with no televisions and a kitchen that cooks to the rhythm of the seasons, has a head start that no sleep package can manufacture.