Combining Leisure Travel and Health

PHOTO: Como Shambhala Resort in Bali. (Photo courtesy Red Savannah)

When George Morgan-Grenville, founder of the custom travel provider Red Savannah, discovered that 70 percent of Americans are considered overweight, including 35.7 percent who are obese, it inspired him to open a new division in his company focused on wellness and health.  

Morgan-Grenville discovered that, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more than two-thirds of American adults are overweight, with a correspondingly high and growing rate of diabetes. Sixty percent of deaths are caused by chronic disease. He also discovered that stress accounts for 35 percent of work-related illness. Within all this bad news he saw a glaring need that he felt could be addressed in an enjoyable way through travel. Who says good health practices have to be dull?

He set about devising travel programs that would promote better mental and physical health through nutrition, activity and meditation, “to enable people to take control of their lives,” he said.  

Morgan-Grenville had founded Red Savannah in 2011 after serving as president of Abercrombie & Kent USA from 2002 to 2008, and group managing director of A&K in London through 2010.

The company started with luxury villa rentals in Europe and the Caribbean and custom-designed experiential travel worldwide. This month the company is branching out with a new division and a new brand: Zen Savannah.

“What we have is a really niche company that takes on individual cases and helps people plan how to achieve the goals they want to achieve,” he said.  

The mission of Zen Savannah is to enable customers to “organize a well-tailored retreat in a lovely environment at lovely time of year in Europe,” said Morgan-Grenville. “Typically these will be run in spring and fall.”

The retreats chosen for inclusion in the program are in Austria, India, Thailand, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Tanzania and Bali.

“The atmosphere will be more akin to a house party than staying in a hotel, where if you are traveling on your own, you may not know anybody and then may have rather lonely evenings,” said Morgan-Grenville.

“This is the combination of having the wellness staff really focus on your needs and to do so in an environment where there are people who have similar aspirations to yourself in terms of their need to improve their lives and their health.”

The company is starting with the custom programs using 22 villas selected from its extensive portfolio of some 400 villas. In its second phase Zen Savannah will start operating its retreats in its own villas.

The selection process, said Morgan-Grenville, was painstaking and takes a lot of guesswork from customers.

“We started with a list of 60 places, then narrowed it to 40, and now we have distilled it to 22,” he said. “We are working with the best and most effective well-being resorts across the world.

“It’s very difficult if you want to get some aspect of health sorted out to know which place works best. Like everything, if you go online you’ll find 101 different opinions on a single place, so it makes it even harder to decide.”

Zen Savannah’s staff will listen to the needs and aspirations of customers and work with them to find the right environment in which to accomplish them.

“What we’ve tried to be able to do is offer the right advice to people, so having listened to what somebody wants to achieve, what they feel their issues and problems are, we can make sure they are sent to the right place, the most appropriate place, for their particular needs.”

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