These are the Condé Nast Traveller Spa Guide winners: the top-level retreats and medi-clinics, the most-results-driven health centres and the slickest spas.
The 2021 winners
Chris SchalkxChiva-Som, Hua Hin, Thailand
Spa guide winner: Best destination spa
The legend gets a super-charged revamp
This is one of the original destination spas in Asia, the kind of one-stop, fix-all properties that brings together soul-soothing heat and sunshine with physically and emotionally nourishing therapies. Its meaningful message has resonated globally, inspiring a worldly crowd of guests to invest deeply – with time and money – into their health. The offering is almost overwhelming, knocking on more than 150 different treatments, from traditional Thai and Ayurvedic modalities and chakra balancing to naturopathic consultations. Then there’s the perhaps surprising aesthetic-beauty department, plus serious remedial physiotherapy and rehabilitation, and the most prolific, high-profile roll-call of visiting therapists imaginable. No wonder David and Victoria Beckham, Kate Moss and Elle Macpherson have made numerous pilgrimages.
Healing Holidays (healingholidays.com +44 20 7843 3592) can arrange a seven-night stay from £4,379.00 per person sharing, including British Airways flights, transfers, full board accommodation, a wellness consultation, one daily treatment and £625 wellness credit.
Now read our full Chiva-Som spa review
Euphoria Retreat, Greece
Spa guide winner: Best fitness programme
Heavyweight action against a historic backdrop
In the ancient world, the Spartans were famed for their fighting prowess, with only the strongest, fastest and most focused surviving their rigorous boot camps. Fast-forward a couple of millennia and Euphoria, one of Europe’s best destination spas, sits on the Peloponnese town’s doorstep. The Spartan Spirit of Adventure programme here certainly ticks all the boxes for modern-day workout warriors. It places emphasis on exercising outdoors, proven to burn calories, boost mood and lower blood pressure more efficiently than a gym session, with plenty of HIIT for devouring visceral fat. But, best of all, it weaves in the region’s history, putting a 21st-century spin on the games played by those musclemen of old.
Healing Holidays (healingholidays.com +44 20 7843 3592) can arrange a three-night Spartan Spirit Of Adventure programme from £1,799.00 per person sharing, including flights, transfers, full board accommodation and inclusions of the Spartan Spirit Of Adventure programme
Now read our full Euphoria Retreat spa review
Four Seasons Resort Maldives at Landaa Giraavaru
Spa guide winner: Most meaningful experience
Teen-centred treatments to encourage budding yogis
Here amid the unfettered beauty of the Maldives is a spa whose spirituality and infectious vitality permeates. Its philosophy of Ayurveda gently threads through the entire island. The four diverse restaurants (Asian, Middle Eastern, Italian and a grill) trumpet the dosha-soothing properties of each dish, so it’s possible to eat holistically too. Meanwhile the spa fosters seismic alchemical shifts. Dr Shylesh Subramanya takes his patients’ pulses, reads their minds like a medium and their bodies like braille. After a forensic consultation, he assigns bespoke programmes including two hours of yoga and pranayama per day for either stress management, women’s or men’s health, thyroid care, spinal issues or addiction. Take testy teenagers with their slouched shoulders and jittery focus from excessive screen time and witness them turn into toned enthusiasts.
A three-day Yoga Therapy package costs about £500 per person. Oceanfront bungalows from about £1,270 (fourseasons.com).
Now read our full Four Seasons Resort Maldives at Landaa Giraavaru spa review
Masqi, The Energy House, Spain
Spa guide winner: Best holistic hideawway
Wildly supportive off-grid hideout
Quiet to the point of silence, apart from birdsong, and set in a national park an hour’s drive from the coast, MasQi is one of those discoveries that makes visitors feel torn. Remote and peaceful, it’s utterly restorative and not particularly expensive, and there are always cheap flights to Alicante, the nearest airport. So on one hand there’s the desire to shout about it from the rooftops. But on the other it’s tempting to keep quiet and hope that no one else will hear about it. On the approach, there’s a kind of literal departure from hectic daily life. The taxi has to leave the road and slow to a crawl for the last few hundred yards, inching down the hillside over rutted tracks. The benign energy of the place is instantly apparent. The main building, an elegantly restored 1880s farmhouse with eight uncluttered bedrooms, overlooks a pine-shaded lawn, and beyond that, mile upon mile of empty countryside.
A three-night programme costs from about £490 per person, full board, including all classes. Treatments are extra (masqi.es).
Now read our full Masqi, The Energy House spa review
Ayurveda Parkschloesschen
Spa guide winner: Best Ayurvedic retreat
Indian philosophy at an unfailing European outpost
This is detoxing the old-school way, a millennia-based method rooted in Ayurveda and still utterly relevant for today. The wildly effective and heavy-duty panchakarma (a nine-, 13-, 20- or 34-night stay that removes metabolic waste from the body with medical enemas) is as successful a resolve for 21st-century burnout as it is for good old-fashioned weight loss. Parkschlösschen is the German epicentre for Ayurveda. Founded in 1993 by the late Wolfgang Preuss, a disciple of the Indian philosophy of self-healing by prevention, it provided somewhere smart in Europe to practise it. The retreat is now run by his daughter Carina, whose warm nature lends a softness to what can be a hardcore process. Panchakarma gives phenomenal results but involves intense scheduling: wake-up is before 7am, with oil swishing around the mouth, scraping the tongue (a potential organ for infection), lots of hot water and detox drinks, more oil in the nostrils and ears, yoga and meditation. All before breakfast.
Healing Holidays (healingholidays.com +44 20 7843 3592) can arrange a seven-night Yoga programme from £1,749.00 per person sharing, including British Airways flights, transfers, full board accommodation and inclusions of the Yoga programme.
Now read our full Ayurveda Parkschloesschen spa review
Keep scrolling to see the previous winners…
The 2019 winners
Amy DickersonGolden Door, California, USA
Spa guide winner: Best for enduring excellence
A west coast classic that shines on supremely
The most legendary health retreat in all America, if not the world. When it opened in the 1950s, Golden Door positioned itself as the glamorous younger sister to Rancho La Puerta (born from the same parents and located just across the border in Mexico). While Rancho La Puerta was modelled more on hippie commune-style living, Golden Door swiftly garnered a star following, with Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor enjoying its stratospheric levels of comfort, privacy and bespoke care. Individual attention is still the aim of the game, or at least as much as possible within the confines of a group retreat. Forty cocooning bedrooms are home to alpha females travelling solo (although the co-ed and men’s camps are also book-ahead popular), and each night a personal schedule has suggestions to nudge guests out of their comfort zone...
Healing Holidays can arrange a seven-night retreat from £8,390 per person sharing including British Airways flights, transfers and full board accommodation.
Now read our full Golden Door spa review
Hotel Palacio Estoril, near Lisbon, Portugal
Spa guide winner: Best for targeted healing
Posture-fixing and water-based therapies at the hotel that inspired James Bond
There’s a marvellous sense of the clandestine at this chandeliered seaside hotel. During the war, Ian Fleming came spy-watching in the bar and jotted down the idea of a certain well-tailored secret agent. Now you can slip away from the ornate Thirties building via a marble-lined underground passage, disguised only by a towelling robe, and reappear in the clean-cut wellness centre, where a floor of scented, sure-handed Banyan Tree treatments is capped by two floors of fitness and medical. Fashionable Portuguese have been taken the waters at Estoril since the 19th century, and the spa funnels that tradition through jets of hydro-massage, Vichy pampering and sessions in the therapy pool – wobbling to maintain yoga poses on an oversized surf board; pedalling underwater while a sergeant-major voice instructs you to ‘push the water’...
Healing Holidays can arrange a seven-night Physical Rehabilitation Programme from £1,645 per person sharing including British Airways flights, transfers and accommodation.
Now read our full Hotel Palacio Estoril spa review
Hotel Post Bezau, Bregenz Forest, Austria
Spa guide winner: Best for a naturally healthy hideaway
Tap into the potential of botanics
It's unlikely you'll have heard of the Hotel Post in Bezau, in the Bregenz forest of the Austrian Alps – a corner of the world best-known for two things: hiking and cheese. But what might feel more familiar is the simple packaging of the prettiest botanic beauty line around. Now 15 years old, Susanne Kaufmann's brand, with its glass bottles in grey and white, bears a small Tweetie Pie motif (her husband's surname, Vogel, means bird in German). She started making her own organic skincare when she realised that the products used in her family's hotel spa didn't reflect the hotel's philosophy. The Post Bezau doors were first opened by Kaufmann's great-great-grandfather in 1850, and although there is chalet-style cladding in the restaurant, it is far from a stuffy mountain hotel...
Now read our full Hotel Post Bezau spa review
Preidlhof, South Tyrol, Italy
Spa guide winner: Best for a clean-eating fix
A little-known bolthole for big results
This resolutely Euro health hotspot, tucked into the orchard- and vineyard-covered South Tyrol hillside, has spectacular views of the green Vinschgau Valley. It also has a thumping wellness philosophy that is delivered with the cheeriest of smiles by the most glowing staff. And yet it flies remarkably under the radar in the conversation about detox spots. Perhaps that’s because the process here is so soothing and doesn’t lean towards Mayr methods. Instead, it has been served up with a slice of traditional Alpine hospitality by the Ladurner family for the past 50 years. The central focus hinges on the Mediterranean dolce vita, with the majority of guests visiting to lose weight, get fit and recuperate. The difference here is that they are effectively weaned off old patterns and bad habits, mindless plate-heaping and all-day grazing, without discomfort...
Healing Holidays can arrange a five-night Detox programme from £1,962 per person sharing including British Airways flights, transfers and full board accommodation.
Now read our full Preidlhof spa review
James RoddFour Seasons The Nam Hai, Hoi An, Vietnam
Spa guide winner: Best for emotional recovery space
Powerful effects in an unexpected corner
Vietnam perhaps doesn’t spring to mind quite as quickly as Thailand, or India or China, when it comes to healing heritage, but its traditional medicine practice is just as heavy hitting. And on an emotional level it excels, too, particularly at the Four Seasons just outside pretty Hoi An. If you are suffering from a broken heart, feel mildly depressed or are reeling with existential despair, hope will be rekindled here. Sitting by a lotus-flower-filled lake with eight floating treatment rooms, this spa – called The Heart of the Earth – is stupendous. Inspired by the Buddhist teachings of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, treatments are grouped into the three wellbeing categories of Stability, Creativity and Non-Judgement, with homemade massage oils to match...
Healing Holidays can arrange a seven-night stay from £2,875 per person sharing including flights, transfers and accommodation.
Now read our full Four Seasons The Nam Hai spa review
The 2019 Spa Guide in association with Healing Holidays was originally published with the March 2019 issue.
The 2018 winners
Vivamayr Altaussee, Austria
Spa guide winner: Best for targeted healing
Now read our full review of Viva Mayr Altaussee
L'Albereta, Italy
Spa guide winner: Best for a smart detox escape
Now read our full review of L'Albereta, Italy
Clinique la Prairie, Switzerland
Spa guide winner: The most progressive clinic
Now read our full of Clinique la Prairie, Switzerland
Tia Wellness Resort, Vietnam
Spa guide winner: Best for a clean-eating fix
Now read our full review of Tia Wellness Resort, formerly known as Fusion Maia, Vietnam
Schloss Elmau, Germany
Spa guide winner: Best for a family getaway
Now read our full review of Schloss Elmau, Germany
The 2018 Spa Guide in association with Healing Holidays was originally published with the March 2018 issue.