Wellness Retreats. wasted money? well. no.

For most of us, wellness is throwing money away. If we have to pay to find peace, we might as well check ourselves into an institution. Or just get shot. Either works. Let me paint you a picture: You're in a relationship that's gotten shaky, so naturally you think a nice getaway together might help.

Switch off. Unwind. Change of scenery. And what's better than an overpriced hotel room stuffed with IKEA furniture and draped in Art Deco? Exactly. So you book your wellness experience through some sketchy booking site, hoping to breathe new life into things. Where? Not too far away, obviously, because who wants a long journey on top of everything else.

Look, I grew up in a tourism family. After school I trained as a travel agent, worked in the family business that's been around for almost 80 years. I know what we want as customers, and I know where things go wrong. It's those hidden traps, costs, those manufactured moments that leave us with a bad taste. We all know that feeling - "yes, I'm informed" and "yes, I know 'treatments' cost extra" – but we're here to arrive, to vacation, to relax. We don't want sales pitches and we don't want to feel ripped off.

Wellness means having space. Breaking out of familiar surroundings, not being constantly triggered by visual cues. Feeling our mind, soul, and body come to rest. There should be no need for a nine-to-five physiotherapist who kneads through 20 guests a day. We need space. When framing people with a camera, there's this thing called headroom - the distance between hair and top of frame. More headroom suggests thinking. Same goes for rooms. The more space above, the more space we have to think, to feel, to perceive ourselves. To not feel trapped.

And that's what many hotels don't get. Sure, occupancy rates matter, but those depend on the vibe created for guests. Small, dark, cave-like rooms, windows with bars, blocked views, too much decoration - none of that brings peace. What we need are open spaces. Calm walls, clear and natural surfaces, and above all, light. Not artificial LED strips or blue daylight bulbs, but calming lights that create that warm feeling of security.

So I arrive at the Kronthaler, and first thing I notice is this long corridor leading to the main space of my chalet. Not particularly wide, rather narrow. Which inevitably forces you to look up. With that upward movement comes a word - a naturally whispered "wow". When we enter a room and immediately feel like we can let go, that's when everything's been done right. That's when we know we're in the right place.

130 square meters is something. Just for sleeping. For maybe sitting on the couch. 357 euros per night half-board is also something. And here's the crucial question we all ask: Is it worth it? Is it worth spending 714 euros for two nights just to relax?

We can talk anything up. The food, the cocktails, the spa, the landscape, the weather, even the room. For the same money we could fly to the beach for two weeks in December, all inclusive. Meet people from around the world, get entertainment all day, basically get drunk for free. Yeah. But how much time do we actually have to feel ourselves again? How much peace do we get to hear our own heartbeat? How much do we escape our ego and return to ourselves? Pretty difficult next to cheap dance music from the animation team's speakers.

Wellness isn't booking treatments and having appointment stress on vacation. Wellness is being in an environment that lets us come down. Wellness is finally having the opportunity to hear answers we usually suppress. That can hurt. Especially when we realize we've been running in the wrong direction for too long. Nobody massages these insights out of us. They don't come from stretching exercises. They come when our head, heart, and body finally have time to sync up again. And that, friends, is priceless. So fuck the money, we can't take it with us anyway.