Ayurvedic tourism & the AOL founder's healthcare revoltution

"In the Land of Four-Star Asceticism" is a NYT travel article about health resorts in the south Indian state Kerala where visitors, mostly German tourists and Lonely Planet types, take the "the humble oath of four-star asceticism" to immerse in ayurveda, "the 3,500-year-old herb-based healing tradition that still flourishes in the daily life of India." So what is that humble oath?

...to forsake all known forms of vacation decadence (rice gruel for dinner, anyone?), to give up meat, alcohol, caffeine, leather accessories, naps, sunbathing, swimming and mindless frivolity in order to purify and balance your whacked-out Western body and soul...

Why people would pay money to live like ascetics and get "detoxed" by unscientifically proven therapies is part of an interesting trend that I call the "wholesome trend," which has many aspects. Among them are care oriented around the whole person -- mind, body & spirit -- and not just one part, ingestion of wholesome (i.e., natural or organic) foods & herbs, wholesome (non-artificial, as in medications & surgical) interventions like yoga & acupuncture.

These resorts, centuries old, have detected that trend (rather their investors have) and have thus rebranded themselves to appeal to Westerners with deep pockets. The one featured here, the Kalari Kovilakom, "markets itself as combining 'the indulgence of a palace with the austerity of an ashram.'"

Is this just another Eastern fad? AOL founder Steve Case doesn't believe so. According to a recent Honolulu Advertiser article on him.

Case, who last year started a company focusing on healthcare and luxury resorts, tells his audience that the U.S. is ripe for a transformation.

"The objective of this movement must be to make healthier, more sustainable lifestyles available to every American," says Case, 48, who's wearing an open-collar shirt and khakis. "If we achieve that, we will effectuate nothing short of a revolution in this country."

The founder of Revolution LLC is making big promises. He's done it before. In 2000, as chief executive officer of America Online Inc., Case pitched the acquisition of Time Warner Inc. to his shareholders, saying it would create new ways for people to shop and communicate.

And according to an older Washington Post article, Case is "bet[ting] that activities once associated with a new-age lifestyle are going mainstream."

Case was right more than a decade ago with Internet use, confined at the time to academics, going maintream, and he took advantage of a widely undetected demand among ordinary Americans to get onto the WWW.

So perhaps he's right about the "wholesomeness trend," about the desire for middle and upper-class Americans to live more "holistically" and to pay more to do so. And perhaps Case's new company, and the rebranding of ayurvedic health resorts in India, are based on a bigger trend, one labeled the "experience economy" by a 1999 book of the same name. (Dan Pink writes about it here.)

If so, then entrepreneurs & investors beware. An experience economy thrives in times of economic wealth, but when that economic wealth is being sapped, like now largely thanks to higher oil prices, interest rate hikes and inflationary pressures, people tend to stop spending on experiences and become more price and value-conscious.

This is the gist of this past week Slate's Daniel Gross article, "The Rising Cost of Living Well," detailing the falling fortunes (and stock prices) of companies like Starbucks and Whole Foods, companies steeply entrenched in the experience economy (and the wholesome one too).

It will be interesting to see if companies that service people's desire to live more wholesomely can still thrive during economic recessions, because then the trend is truly deeper than a superficial new-age desire.