This is a deeply personal article to write. As a long-time insomnia suffer, any event that brings to light actions at home and at hotels that can be taken to improve one’s sleep quality is music to my ears.
Hence, I was honored and delighted to have the opportunity to attend the second annual Global Sleep Symposium at the Equinox Hotel New York this past May – a conference devoted to raising awareness for sleep best practices and how Equinox Hotels is pioneering the best possible sleep for its guests with advanced room design and on-prem amenities.
The highlight of the event was sitting across the room from none other than Dr. Matthew Walker who wrote the book, “Why We Sleep” (2018) along with Chris Norton, CEO of Equinox Hotels, Dr. Wendy Troxel, author of “Sharing the Covers” (2021), and Dr. Aric Pather, where we were able to ask thoughtful questions about the future of sleep, innovative technologies in the space and how their work will influence our lives.
From the title, you may think that depicting a single symposium as the embodiment of a whole new era is grandiose. But good sleep is so foundational to human health; for instance, in the past 20 years we haven’t discovered a single psychological condition where sleep is not disrupted. Findings like this speak to the paradigm shift happening right now as people discover sleep’s importance to health.
Each day more and more of us are waking up (pun intended) to this fact and scheduling their lives to prioritize sleep. This societal progression thus has profound implications for consumer products, work-life balance, food purchases and all aspects of travel.
Health Is Wealth
Hardly just for my own interest, one motto I use as a north star for guiding my thoughts is, “The more personal, the more universal.” Undoubtedly, there are millions, if not billions, of other people that endure bouts of poor sleep, especially when traveling and staying in a foreign environment.
Indeed, one place to look is to Gen Z, the first generation that is truly taking the phrase ‘health is wealth’ to heart. They eat clean; fewer of them drink or smoke; they exercise more often than older generations; they increasingly prioritize their disposable spend on wellness products and experiences.
Next, any cursory search for insomnia statistics will reveal just how many of us are currently living with some form of impaired sleep. I need not list those figures; the numbers are shocking, particularly when you consider the long-term chronic diseases that are associated with poor sleep quality. With today’s always-on, fast-paced, hyper-connected culture, sleep issues are also mounting.
In hospitality, we now have the term ‘sleep tourism’ to inscribe the exponential growth of demand for hotels that have sleep-specific amenities or room types so that travelers can get as good a night’s rest as possible while on the road for work or leisure. There are also many ‘sleep retreats’ with focused multi-night programs to help people repattern their sleep back into a healthier norm.
Chris Norton (left) and Dr. Matthew Walker (right) — Photo by Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited
The Future of Hotel Guestroom Design
Set within the calming and contemporary meeting space on the 25th floor of the Equinox Hotel New York, this year’s second annual Global Sleep Symposium took place on the afternoon of May 2, 2025.
With the hotel located in the ultramodern Hudson Yards neighborhood, the unobstructed views of the Hudson River offered a reflective backdrop for the 100 or so attendees to participate in what was an intimate event where everyone left transformed and invigorated about what’s next for sleep hygiene and methods by which to improve one’s nightly habits.
The symposium started with an exclusive Q&A with Dr. Walker and Norton where the spotlight was on how luxury hotel design is shifting to address modernity’s dislocation with natural circadian rhythms.
What Dr. Walker emphasized was that hotels – and all bedrooms for that matter – must first focus on getting the basics in place perfectly: quiet, dark, cool and wholly comfortable guestroom chambers with intuitive nighttime lighting and curtain controls as well as the right in-room amenities to allow guests to slowly calm down in preparation for sleep.
Adding color to that statement, Norton reinforced how serious the Equinox Hotels team takes their sleep amenities by walking the audience through the selection process for the in-room beds. Approaching this from a place of passion for helping their visitors and budgeting three times the unit cost as other luxury brands, the team went through 22 different mattresses before settling on a final choice. They looked at everything: simplicity in design and for room cleaning, all natural materials with cotton and horsehair, handmade, no metal springs, no glue for off-gassed volatile organic compounds (VOCs) than can affect sleep.
Guests may not see all these details and duties of care when staying overnight, but they certainly feel them when they wake up refreshed, commented Norton. The mattress selection process is one of many at the hotel where we’re constantly searching the world for the best in sleep products. We’re constantly asking where guest expectations will be in five years and how we can address them now.
To be serious about sleep design, trendsetters like Equinox Hotels never rest of their laurels; it’s a matter of continuous reinvestment.
An attendee trying out the new Somnee headband — Photo by Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited
The Second Wave of Sleep Technology
As the symposium progressed, Dr. Walker cued all attendees in to what’s on the forefront for sleep technologies that look beyond just the basics of lifestyle adjustments and sleep hygiene. This was prompted by a ‘Discover Your Chronotype’ session where a quiz was given out to help everyone gain personalized insights on when it’s best for them for wake and go to bed, as well as everything in between such as doing taking meetings, creative work, exercising and the ideal time for a midday break.
As Dr. Walker pointed out, there are over 350 genes that influence sleep – a ton of personal variety. Moreover, a mismatch between when your genes tell you is the ideal time and when you actually go to sleep can result is a 30% higher risk of heart attack (and is correlated with many other chronic disease occurrences).
The ‘second wave’ of devices and platforms that have been recently launched or are coming out in the next two years are built around a measure-to-manage framework by giving users more knowledge about what’s affecting their sleep patterns. The goal thereafter is to help users improve daily habits for a optimal circadian rhythmicity.
For this outing of the symposium, delegates were given the chance to preview the latest in sleep technology with interactive displays from Eight Sleep, a temperature-controlled mattress system provider, Oura Ring, makers of a popular sleep tracking wearable, and Somnee, a headband with neural entrainment capabilities.
Within the context of hotels, Dr. Walker added a critical note about the rise of sleep tourism. Please are willing to spend their hard-earned dollars on sleep of all things!
While the nature of hospitality can be quite idiosyncratic in that you aren’t getting guests in their natural state, when it comes to deploying next-gen sleeptech, it’s all about giving them the options – staying flexible while handling the universal fundamentals perfectly.
Guestroom Innovation with the Sleep Lab
To showcase what the new era of hotel design specifically for sleep looks like in the here and now, Jeff Rednour, General Manager of the Equinox Hotel New York, led a tour of their new room type: the Sleep Lab.
A small number of guest chambers have been upgraded with exciting sleep-centric amenities such as a synchronized lighting system, climate controls and curtains that can be preprogrammed to match a person’s at-home circadian rhythms. No alarm clocks needed, these room controls automatically adjust the luminosity and temperature to gradually drift a guest into evening relaxation or bring them to full alertness in the morning.
In the bathroom, a custom blend of scientifically proven essential oils has been added for guests to take a soothing bath to induce a calmer state of mind. Then in the shower, digital controls with temperature display have been added so that guests can take the reins over the precise timing and whether they want it hot or cold.
Musing on the near future, the Sleep Lab room type is at the forefront, and there’s still plenty of room to keep evolving based on the latest sleeptech. Hotels will be able to help guests orchestrate their lives according to their chronotype by giving them access to the technologies that can improve sleep no matter the person’s conditions.
One area would be for night owls, wherein out-of-sync rhythms like shiftwork has been shown to disrupt the repair processes during sleep. Next would be jet lag and sleep debt to aid in rebound recovery. A third area would be aiding older guests who need the same amount of sleep as younger adults, but they oftentimes experience a gradual decline across their lifespans.
Panel discussion with (left to right) Dr. Aric Pather, Dr. Wendy Troxel and Dr. Matthew Walker — Photo by Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited
Bedroom Design for Couples and Staff
The third main session was where Dr. Walker was joined by fellow sleep experts Dr. Troxel and Dr. Pather to chat about other best practices for bedroom design as well as what can be done to improve sleep quality when sharing the bed with a significant other.
Crucially, what the latest evidence suggests is that it’s not just the total amount of sleep that matters but the regularity of that sleep. This can be a problem when there’s a ‘chronotype mismatch’ amongst couples.
The tried-and-true method for solving this is by using separate duvets or comforters. Alarm clocks can be individualized, although in many cases an absence is preferred, especially for insomniacs who may stress when viewing the time. To this end, one interesting area that’s being explored is ‘rhythmic synchrony’ where hotels can look at how soundscapes can influence sleep patterning. Last of note, with the most commonly cited sleep supplement being melatonin, the panelists cautioned that this is a hormone and overdose cases have increased 500% over the past decade.
And as it relates to a hotel’s staff, the panel also discussed how sleep disturbances are socioeconomically distributed, with poorer households often suffering more often than wealthier ones. Hence, making good sleep more demographically available via educational programs or ‘sleep literacy’ and circadian-oriented policy changes can go a long way to improving morale, affecting the bottom line through reduced turnover, fewer sick days and better guest service overall.
Insomnia as an Ongoing Battle
To close out by circling back to my own situation, it’s a tremendous joy to see hotels starting to take sleep amenities seriously so that people with insomnia can get some relief while traveling.
For context, since attending the Global Sleep Symposium – under two months – I’ve had numerous personal setbacks: a relative hospitalized from a major car accident, a parent undergoing radiation therapy and the ongoing struggles with trying to get ahead by grinding out six-day workweeks (to cite just three).
In other words, real life is messy. Insomnia is frequently accompanied by the wide range of everyday anxieties and familial stressors that we are each confronting to varying degrees. Ultimately, the best label we can give to all this is simply ‘being human’.
On the plus side, insomnia does have its advantages: ability to see in the dark, plenty of time to read books under candlelight and the accrual of a whole second brain’s worth of random facts from the extra time spent watching documentaries at 3am.
For everyone to note, this is hardly ‘competitive under-sleeping’. There are innumerable people who are in a near-constant sleep deficit and are striving to improve their sleep each and every night, back at home and while selecting their accommodations. Circadian rhythms emerged with life itself and have survived for 3.8 billion years; check out what the Equinox Hotel New York is doing to make the most of this timeless quality of our planet.
Questions and Answers From This Article
What is sleep tourism and why are luxury hotels focusing on it?
Sleep tourism refers to the growing trend of travelers choosing accommodations specifically designed to enhance rest and recovery. As awareness of sleep’s impact on physical and mental health increases, guests are actively seeking hotels that offer sleep-focused amenities such as blackout rooms, noise reduction, climate control, and wellness programming. Luxury hotels like Equinox are leading this movement, designing rooms around circadian rhythms and offering cutting-edge sleep tech to ensure guests leave feeling recharged.
How are hotels redesigning guest rooms to improve sleep quality for modern travelers?
Modern hotels are integrating scientific principles of sleep hygiene into room design by ensuring quiet, dark, cool, and comfortable environments. At Equinox Hotel New York, rooms include circadian lighting systems, natural mattresses free of VOCs, and customizable climate controls. Innovations like the “Sleep Lab” rooms allow guests to align their environment with their personal chronotype, creating personalized sleep experiences that cater to travelers’ biological rhythms.
Why is understanding chronotypes important for hospitality, and how can hotels support better sleep for all guests?
Chronotypes determine an individual’s optimal times for sleeping, waking, and performing tasks. Mismatches between a guest’s natural rhythm and their environment can lead to poor sleep and long-term health risks. By offering flexible amenities—like programmable lighting, personalized temperature settings, and sleep tracking tech—hotels can support a broader range of sleep needs, including shift workers, jet-lagged travelers, and older adults, helping them recover and maintain well-being even while away from home.
Adam Mogelonsky
Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited
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