Bali has cemented its position as the world's leading wellness destination two decades after Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir "Eat, Pray, Love" sent global tourism surging toward the Indonesian island, with the Ubud resort where Julia Roberts filmed the 2010 movie adaptation still anchoring the market.
The book, published in 2006, and the film that followed turned Ubud from a quiet artists' town into a pilgrimage site for travelers seeking meditation, yoga, and traditional healing. Twenty years later, that demand has not faded — it has expanded into a full industry that now defines the island's high-end tourism sector.
Wellness travel is among the fastest-growing segments of global tourism. The Global Wellness Institute valued the worldwide wellness tourism market at roughly $830 billion in 2023, with travelers booking trips specifically around spa, yoga, and retreat programming rather than treating those activities as add-ons to a beach vacation.
Bali captures a disproportionate share of that spending. The island's combination of Hindu temple culture, jungle and rice-terrace geography, and a deep bench of trained therapists has made it the reference point against which other destinations are measured.
The resort where Roberts stayed while playing Gilbert has pushed spa treatments into elaborate, multi-hour rituals, building a reputation that draws visitors who plan entire trips around its treatment menu. That property, like much of Ubud's hospitality sector, has moved well past the massage-and-robe model.
What has changed since 2006 is scale. Ubud now hosts hundreds of yoga studios, detox programs, and retreat centers, and the island's airport in Denpasar handles millions of international arrivals a year. The wellness economy supports a large share of Bali's workforce, from spa therapists to organic farmers supplying retreat kitchens.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit Bali's tourism economy hard — arrivals collapsed in 2020 and 2021 before rebounding sharply from 2022 onward. That rebound has been led in part by longer-stay wellness visitors, who tend to spend more per day than typical leisure travelers.
Gilbert's book has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, and the film grossed over $200 million. The commercial footprint of that franchise is long gone from Bali's marketing, but its effect on the island's identity is not: Ubud remains the first search result for travelers planning a wellness trip in Southeast Asia.
Competing destinations — Thailand, India, Costa Rica, and Portugal — have built their own wellness sectors, but none has matched Bali's combination of price, infrastructure, and cultural depth. That gap is why, 20 years on, the island still sets the benchmark.
