About Alchemy Wellness Resorts

I’m Sadie Brenner, and Alchemy Wellness Resorts is where I write down, plainly, what wellness retreats are actually like once you strip the marketing off them.

I spent twenty years in marketing, which turns out to be the ideal training for this, because I recognise the machinery the moment it is pointed at me. By forty I was thoroughly burnt out. I booked a week at a yoga retreat with the ambition of a houseplant, to sit in the light and not die, and to my surprise it worked. It also left me deeply curious about the enormous, glossy, largely unregulated industry I had just handed a lot of money to.

So I kept going, on purpose, to a great many of them. Silent retreats and detox weeks, thermal spas and ayurvedic centres, the genuinely restorative and the frankly ridiculous. What I learned is that a good retreat can reset something real, that a bad one is an expensive lie-in with a supplement upsell, and that the brochure almost never tells you which one you are booking.

What this site is, and what it is not

This is an independent guide. It is a review and information site, and nothing more than that.

I want to be blunt about it, because the industry is full of sites that pretend otherwise. Alchemy Wellness Resorts is not a resort. I do not run a retreat, own a spa, or manage a programme anywhere. I am not a booking agent, I cannot reserve you a room, and there is no “book now” button hiding behind any of this. I take no commission from anyone, and I endorse no single retreat. What I do is explain, in plain language, what each kind of retreat actually involves, what it is genuinely worth, what a week really costs, and the warning signs worth heeding.

How the health claims stay honest

Wellness is a field where a confident claim and an evidence-based one are easily mistaken for each other, and this industry makes a great many claims it cannot support. That is where Ingrid Sollberger comes in. Ingrid trained as a physiotherapist before spending years advising spas and retreats, and she fact-checks the health and safety claims on this site. Where I describe what a sauna, a fast, a cold plunge or a cleanse actually does to the body, her job is to hold it to what the evidence supports, strip out the language of miracle cures, and make sure the sensible cautions are in place for readers who are pregnant, older, or managing a condition. You can read more about how that works in my Editorial Policy.

Get in touch

If you have been to a retreat, or you are weighing one up, I would genuinely like to hear from you. The Contact page will reach me. Do read the Wellness Disclaimer as well: wellness is not medical treatment, and everything here is company and information, not advice pitched at your own health.