Carry On: Sober-curious bars and tech-forward spas and hotels to help you travel well
Living and travelling in mindfully clean, healthy and wellness-driven ways is top of mind in 2025
By Charlene Rooke / January 7, 2025
To keep talks sober and serious during business meetings or negotiations, consider entertaining colleagues and clients at a new wave of sober-curious bars. Places like Sans Bar in Austin, Hekate Café & Elixir Lounge in Manhattan’s East Village and Zero Bar in Toronto are providing spaces with all the flavourful drinks, conviviality and events (from trivia nights to non-alc tastings) but none of the alcohol.
Five-Z Hotels
Getting a great night of sleep might just be today’s top traveller obsession. Rosewood Miramar Beach in Santa Barbara offers Bryte smart bed experiences, which use AI to sync soothing mattress motion with a library of sleep-inducing content. Equinox Hotel in New York has a snoozy Sleep Well menu of relaxing food and beverages, sleepy IV drips, CBD massages and personal sleep coaching on offer. New hotel sleeper hits include temperature-regulated FreshBeds at RH Guesthouse in New York’s Meatpacking District, or silk hammock “air naps” in the rainforest near Four Seasons Resort Bali at Sayan.
Check In to Check Out
A new wave of hotel spas promotes your relaxation in wild new ways. There’s a snow shower and a pool with underground soundscapes at Surrenne Spa within The Emory hotel in London. And at wellness hotel Siro at One Za’abeel in Dubai, a vibroacoustic waterbed can soothe you to sleep with sound and vibrational waves.
Make every business trip feel like New Year’s Eve by popping a bespoke coin (purchase at the check-in desk) into the Moët & Chandon vending machine in the W Toronto Living Room lobby bar. The 200-millilitre bottle is just enough for a deal-closing toast.
Jet Setter
That fresh, diamond-pointed loo roll and fluffy box of hotel tissues are actually very wasteful amenities. “A single hotel room can go through 150 rolls of toilet paper and up to 50 tissue boxes annually, with roughly half ending up in the bin,” says Ludovic Siouffi, Fox Fold co-founder and CEO.
Siouffi left a career as a wealth manager to reinvent (with his cousin, Greg Heffer) the space-wasting bathroom roll. With flat-packed tissue stacks that can be easily refilled in stylish mounted boxes, Fox Fold is already impressing big hotel and restaurant groups with its more hygienic and sustainable options for facial and bathroom tissue.
As a dad who travels with young children, Siouffi is also dubious about rolling with the typical public-washroom options. “Fox Fold spent a lot of time investigating the hygiene behind traditional rolls,” he says. “Once you understand how unsanitary they can be, it’s hard to go back to using them, especially for my kids.”
On his own travel wish list for 2025 are trips to Iceland or Japan. “I’ve heard both are out-of-this-world experiences,” Siouffi says. He likes to find time on business trips to dip a toe into something local—such as, during a recent convention in Miami, the warm coastal waters. “I did sneak in a quick 30-minute dip in the ocean: that moment was pure perfection.”
