Meetings and events that invite participants to pause, amid the whirlwind of talks and dinners and receptions, are a breath of fresh air. Landry & Kling has decades of experience applying a company’s business goals to an event, matching it to the right cruise line, and providing elegant solutions that create a successful, memorable event experience for everyone.
The Best of Wellness, in Your Meetings and Events
When practiced with intentionality, wellness extends into all aspects of a person’s life, sparking positivity, productivity, and a sense of peace. When you incorporate wellness into your meetings and events, it means designing experiences that nurture both the body and mind, transforming traditional gatherings into energizing, productive environments.
Consider gratitude journals, a mini-meditation suite, homemade granola, or simply time spent in the fresh air as ways to help your participants feel good about themselves and your event.
Landry & Kling can help you integrate wellness activities in a way that supports, but doesn’t overshadow, your overarching goals and program. When it comes to adding an emphasis on health and wellness, the following best practices can help attendees feel energized throughout the experience.
10 Ideas to Add Wellness Elements to Your Next Meeting or Events
1. Focus on Energy
Give your attendees every reason to stay engaged during the meeting—and to deepen their emotional connection to the overall experience. Keep attendees energized throughout with mini-breaks that offer a spark of vitality, like acupressure, aromatherapy diffusers with citrus scents, water stations, and healthy snacks like nuts, bowls of fresh berries, grape tomatoes, and popcorn.
Even quick-fire icebreakers can not only nudge attendees to utilize their creativity, but also to bring their focus into the present moment. Consider foods that promote energy, from inclusive healthy breakfast options like a greens-and-ginger fruit smoothie instead of a pastry; low-sugar, high-protein Greek yogurt; or vegan sausage with fuller breakfasts; to richly colorful salads and other whole foods for lunch.
In event design, consider the meeting rooms and overall event space, particularly light, climate, and ease of layout, all of which have been proven to increase concentration, when planned thoughtfully. Imagining the way the space will invite or diminish mental clarity can help you make the right choices.
2. Add a Wellness Speaker to Your Program
Bringing in someone to talk about how attendees not only can, but should, focus on their personal wellness journey in pursuit of a full, balanced life, can give them permission to realize that their own health and happiness is not only important to them, but makes them a better collaborator and colleague. Relatable speakers who impart realistic ways to practice stress management, implement mindfulness, focus on one’s physical and mental health, prioritize spending time outdoors, listen to the body’s cues, and take time to recharge, will mean a lot to your participants.
Combining a speaker with activities during the meeting that bring some of the shared ideas to life will make everyone feel good, and that’s always a win.
For virtual events, give attendees the option to join chair yoga or breathwork mini-breaks between major sessions.
3. Include Movement
Countless studies say that sedentary lifestyles can lead to health problems. In a meeting, sitting too long can also cause restlessness and a sense of disengagement. Offer a daily yoga session at an hour that still allows attendees to ensure they have time for restful sleep. Build in wellness breaks that include movement of different kinds. If the size of your meeting or event and venue can accommodate it, find a way to place refreshments just far away enough from the seating area that participants will have to walk a few extra steps.
Consider activities on opposing ends of the ship, allowing enough time in between them to move, and considering people’s different paces. Allow enough time in the schedule for people to use the fitness center onboard. Consider a walk-and-talk networking activity on the outdoor track. Build in stretch breaks, breathing exercises, or chair yoga led by the ship’s wellness staff. And speaking of the ship, an inspiring environment prompts physical activity. Seeing the horizon evokes thoughts of possibilities.
Landry & Kling has the expertise to determine the right ways to ensure that your attendees are active in ways that feel fun, easy, and invigorating, thus making your meeting even more energetic and productive.
4. Leverage Your Location: the Sea
For centuries, the sea has been believed to have healing powers. From the lull of its rhythms to its connection with lunar cycles; from the wonder found in its depths to the salts rich with other minerals; the ocean is not only the beating heart of our planet, but also a magnet for those seeking renewal and transformation.
The horizon, as seen from the deck of a ship, is seemingly endless, yet gazing at it does not evoke a feeling of being untethered, but instead of being grounded in a sense of possibility. Revel in this with your attendees.
Consider the noctourism trend that has travelers seeking ways to bathe in moonlight and starlight, and hold serene outdoor events at night. Or a positioning of seating that allows participants to gaze at the vastness of the sea. Quiet spaces and the sea are a harmonious combination.
For multi-day events, Landry & Kling can help you incorporate ways to spread many opportunities to commune with the sea throughout your gathering.
5. Embrace Mindful Technology Breaks
With most participants putting their personal devices aside during meeting sessions, offering short technology breaks that allow them to check in are important, but it’s important to guide attendees to keep their focus on the present moment. If you have a speaker who spends time focusing on wellness topics, be sure they include the value of a digital detox while also recognizing our need to stay somewhat connected to life back home.
To make the most of technology breaks, hold them in quiet rooms. Ensure that the event schedule is intuitive, with these breaks taking place outside of the most fast-paced parts of each day.
6. Prioritize Sleep and Rest for Peak Performance
Events, meetings and conventions that offer a schedule that considers mental well-being, physical health, sessions and networking opportunities that offer unexpected surprises and deep value, and that keep attendees energized throughout the day are taking a thoughtful approach.
However, the temptation to add as many activities and gatherings as possible is strong, but must be tempered. Allow attendees to have downtime between day parts, and a realistic time for the end of a meeting or dinner that considers the start time the next day. Let the elements of your meeting or event flow naturally, at a non-frenetic pace that lets participants deeply absorb new information. Create mindful meetings not only by what happens during the day, but by the number of hours attendees have to recharge in the privacy of their room or suite.
7. Foster a Supportive Wellness Community
Event planners who know how wellness could enhance meetings, often practice wellness in their own lives. Encourage your own colleagues as well as attendees to share their enthusiasm for wellness sessions, mental and physical self-care, yoga or meditation sessions, and other wellness options.
Revel in the shared desire to be one’s healthiest, happiest self.
8. Breathe Deeply with Ocean Breeze Exercises
Breathwork, especially when led by a certified practitioner, is a life-changing skill. A cruise ship, surrounded by endless fresh air and blue sky and sea, is the ideal place to learn simple techniques that can stay with someone for years to come. A breathwork practitioner will teach attendees how to reduce stress in the moment through structured, intentional breathing that sometimes incorporates the entire body.
Ensuring you have access to outdoor meeting space for this session, in the right weather, is one of the most powerful ways to incorporate wellness into your event.
9. Nourish with Healthy, Cruise-Inspired Snacks
For snacks, offering healthy options such as a superfoods buffet (think small portions and dishes made with blueberries, acai, kale, tomatoes, oranges, almonds, walnuts, yogurt, avocadoes, cocoa, and kimchi among other ingredients) are one of the ways in-person events can give attendees the nourishment they need to feel good. Healthy food and beverage options elevate their sense of the meeting itself being good for them. As long as they’re offered in a visually compelling and delicious presentation, these items cater to the body’s need for energy, the brain’s need for fuel and even the senses’ attraction to colorful variety.
10. Gratitude Moments at Sunrise or Sunset
Whether one is busy or enjoying leisure time in life, whether things are all coming together perfectly or challenges seem to be in high supply, practicing gratitude is a global wellness technique that is known to keep one consistently feeling grounded. During meetings and events held away from one’s home and workplace, a new perspective inspired by a different setting or destination, can make gratitude practice even more expansive.
Offer guided meditation or massage at sunrise, to invite attendees to start their day with joy and openness. Promote mindfulness with a sunset gratitude mini-break entirely focused on nature’s beauty. Consider a networking event outdoors followed by a moonlight soundbath or sleep-inducing yoga offering instead of another dinner one evening. Incorporating wellness breaks throughout the day can mean chair massage, journaling, using coloring books, discussing life hacks for stress management, and other ideas to help attendees realize that their emotional and mental well-being is important to you.
FAQs
How do you ensure wellness activities do not disrupt business goals?
Consider what the event or meeting must accomplish, from a business perspective. Then, ask yourself how attendees are most likely to absorb information, focus energy, and creatively brainstorm. And, think about how you want the meeting or event to stay with them and impact their work moving forward. Will the meeting be a success if attendees feel they have soothing space to relax, recharge, and transform, and arrive at sessions with mental clarity and a dynamic sense of possibility? Or will the meeting be a success if all sessions are high-pressure and the schedule is fast-paced? Will attendees have a favorable experience that leads to loyalty if they feel good, or if they feel exhausted? Each business has its own culture, and each event has its own scenario, but usually, even just a few wellness options can go a long way toward making attendees feel their physical and mental well-being is important.
How can we balance wellness elements with a packed agenda?
If wellness is considered from the beginning, and each day has the flexibility to offer a different pace, an agenda can be balanced and highly productive. Can every other day start an hour later, or end at least an hour earlier, to allow attendees time to sleep?
Also consider that if you’re going to focus on wellness topics like stress management, even briefly, the event itself should be an example of how to apply stress management techniques. Bring wellness ideas to life where it makes sense naturally. Bringing wellness into your next meeting doesn’t mean it’s a wellness meeting; it means it’s a meeting where wellness is prioritized throughout the event as a means to making everyone feel good, participate mindfully, and take real value from the experience.
What are the hottest wellness trends right now?
Wellness trends in meetings tend to mirror those in our daily lives. Mental and physical health are central to so much of what we do. Reducing or removing screen time (known as a digital detox), focusing on hydration, choosing activities and lifestyles that promote longevity, and recognizing the immense importance of sleep are top-of-mind in 2025.
Movement, meditation, nutrition, a sense of living a well-balanced life, and wellness tourism (or recognizing that all travel is wellness travel, as it sparks discovery and wonder and breaks us out of our comfort zones) are all core elements of the ever-evolving focus on being happy, healthy, and well.
