Ayurvedic treatments and cutting-edge spa therapies in Bali or finding your inner child at a fitness reboot in Indonesia, it’s all in a day’s work for Dervla Louli Musgrave. The Irish-born, Hong Kong-based entrepreneur has created a dream job around wellness tourism – holidays aimed at improving and enhancing physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. As founder of online booking portal Compare Retreats, a large part of her remit is to travel the globe, reviewing the world’s leading luxury wellness retreats.

Hot springs and mud masks aside, wellness tourism is big business. According to Grand View Research, the global wellness tourism market size was valued at $814.6 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.42 per cent from 2023 to 2030.

Following an unlikely path to entrepreneurship, Louli Musgrave studied business and law, followed by a MSC in Finance from Trinity. “I always knew that one day I would own my own business. But my passion is publishing,” she said.

As the former digital editor of Hong Kong Tatler, director of integrated content at Edipresse Media Asia, and the managing editor of Sassy Media Group, she developed an aptitude for merging commercial and creative, and a love for digital publishing grew.

“I learned how to help brands and effectively take a product and market it to the correct audience and saw the value in connecting brands with the right people. When I moved to Tatler, I did more integrated publishing with print and learned how to make a lot of content in quite a clever way, making it work for different platforms and different regions,” she said.

While running along Hong Kong’s Bowen Road in 2017, Louli Musgrave hit on the idea of creating her own online portal to help people sift through all the hyperbole on the internet to find a wellness retreat that would deliver transformational experiences.

Soon after launching, she says she received an email from a burnt-out client desperate for recommendations. “There’s that moment where you realise that you’ve built something that people actually need,” Louli Musgrave said.

The business strategy involved approaching content from an editorial point of view and featuring reviews by certified health and fitness professionals. Practising what she preached, Louli Musgrave trained to achieve a yoga teacher certification and enlisted other ex-publishing industry professionals who had gone on to qualify as wellness professionals.

For the next three years, the team would travel the world reviewing properties to make sure they were good enough to be included in the Compare Retreats edit. “For as many beautiful retreats I have seen, I’ve seen some horrendous ones. And it was so important to me that I had seen most of them or one of my team had seen them with our own eyes and that they would stand the test of time,” she said.

“One of the problems with the retreat market is that it’s all very blurry. What is a retreat? What is a spa? There’s no real definitions or standards and that’s what’s nice about Compare Retreats – you can go knowing you’ll be in a beautiful room and the experts will be qualified. You know you’re going to get some life-changing results.

“Taking time to go on a retreat is a huge luxury so we really respect people’s time. And it’s always going to be, to a certain extent, on the higher end of a package versus any other trip you’re going to take and I’m conscious of that. Our clients are very discerning. They don’t want to waste time or money. And they really value beauty. All of the resorts we work with are so beautiful.

“In magazine publishing, you’re always looking for the corner to take the picture in, or how to make life beautiful. I’m very sensitive to my surroundings, and I think it’s really important if you’re going away for a few days to get well, it should be beautiful. Chances are, in a retreat, you’re going to be deprived of something – if you are going to deprive me of caffeine I need to be at the best spa. You don’t need your surroundings to be subpar if you’re going through uncomfortable transitions and that’s why people come to us. They want life-changing moments. That’s why I built Compare Retreats.”

“There’s that moment where you realise that you’ve built something that people actually need.”

With travel at the core, and based in Hong Kong, the business was impacted by the pandemic at an early stage. “We got hit on January 23. By February 1, I realised what was happening and baked two dozen loaves of brown bread, which turned out to be my stress relief,” she said.

“I was in the middle of a successful seed round and I stopped fundraising for obvious reasons. It wasn’t the appropriate climate and I removed as many fixed operational costs from our balance sheet as possible. We hunkered down and hibernated. It wasn’t the time to lean in.”

Dervla Louli Musgrave

The team’s content output was cut by a quarter. “Hong Kong was badly hit. Because it’s an island we travel extensively and the Hong Kong traveller is strong, they spend quite a lot of money when they go away, but I realised the business strategy was strong. Of course our traffic dipped because people weren’t searching for travel and I reduced operating costs by 90 per cent,” she said.

“I had started playing around with Google ad words and Facebook and Instagram marketing and I cut all of that. Our main acquisition strategy was content, and 90 per cent of our customers come to us through SEO long-tail search. What saved us was that evergreen SEO content strategy, focusing on quality over quantity.”

Business resumed swiftly once the borders reopened. “We’re back at pre-Covid lead number because we spent two years re-honing all of our SEO content and getting partnerships with Booking.com to get passive income and strengthening our relationships with properties.

“I was lucky that the company was small enough and our variable overheads were really low. It doesn’t require a lot of upkeep. We’re not like these mass bookings systems that are constantly churning new dates, new pop-ups, new retreats, we don’t churn. Our business model is based upon really, really high-quality properties that offer retreats all year round.”

According to Global Wellness’ Future of Wellness 2023 Report, “the long, thoughtful pause forced by the pandemic has transformed the very idea of ‘wellness’. People are now more reflective, they seek more science … and want solutions that are meaningful and work.”

The growth in demand for medical retreats reflects these trends.

“Medical retreats have a special place in my heart. I got into medical school but decided not to go, pursuing a more holistic wellness path. I think medical retreats are amazing because so much of our life is spent catching up with our health, waiting until we are sick to get better. But there’s something to be said about going somewhere for three to seven days where your only purpose is to figure out if there is something wrong and how you can fix it. What lifestyle changes can be made, it’s like getting a head start,” she said.

“Getting help in the perfect setting and atmosphere is great because it’s really hard to make lifestyle changes by yourself. And, on a more serious note, if there are medical issues, cancer, fertility problems, maybe diabetes is setting in, they can help you catch it before symptoms force you to go to a doctor. I love medical retreats combined with another holistic form of medicine whether that’s traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) ayurveda or naturopathy – they can apply different modalities of medicine together. Personally, I’ve had the most amazing effects in combining Western medicine with Ayurveda with TCM, and I definitely see myself as a bit of a guinea pig.

“Hand on heart, the Ayurveda retreat at COMO Shambhala Estate in Bali changed my life. I made dietary changes based on my dosha that the Ayurvedic doctor recommended and I have not eaten garlic or onions since. Digestive problems I’d had for 15 years came to a halt. I did the comprehensive detox at Chiva Som in Thailand and it completely changed my relationship with sleep and caffeine.”

While Compare Retreat continues to sustain itself, Louli Musgrave has big plans brewing.

“I was fundraising to make it possible for people to see and book a retreat in two steps to make it as easy as booking a hotel room. And that requires tech that does not exist yet. Because we’ve created a new subset in the hospitality industry. You are booking so much more than a hotel room when you’re booking with us. So it’s my dream to be able to see, book, and buy in two clicks. Why is it more difficult to see a picture of a beautiful retreat on social media and book and buy it, but you can see a beautiful pair of shoes and buy them? It evades me, and that’s what we were fundraising for,” she said.

‘Our biggest pain point is that people want to go away and they want to go away now. When you book a wellness retreat, it’s an emotional thing. You feel terrible. And we’re trying to, from a business point of view, catch people in that emotional moment. So we’re trying to bring immediacy to the wellness travel market. See now, buy now, but for retreats.”