Wellness tourism used to be fairly predictable. Book the beautiful hotel, squeeze in a massage, attempt some yoga, drink something green and return home feeling marginally more virtuous. Until I sat down with Skin Renewal co-founders Dr Maureen Allem and Victor Snyders and discovered that I may have been doing wellness travel, and skincare, all wrong.
By Milou Staub
South Africa has always offered international visitors remarkable value. They arrive and marvel at what their pounds, euros and dollars can buy them: excellent restaurants, world-class hotels, verdant wine estates, unique safaris and other experiences that would cost considerably more back home. According to Snyders, however, there’ s another South African bargain hiding in plain sight: aesthetic treatments. He explains that treatments such as Botox can cost around 2.2 to 2.3 times less in South Africa than overseas. Suddenly, fitting in a skin clinic visit between the Waterfront and the Winelands doesn’ t sound so ridiculous.
The New Wellness Souvenir We’ re perfectly happy to travel for wellness. We’ ll fly somewhere for a yoga retreat, choose a hotel because of its spa and sacrifice an afternoon to being wrapped, scrubbed and massaged. But what if our holiday treatment actually did something beyond making us smell fabulous until dinner? At Skin Renewal, medically supervised treatments address concerns including ageing, pigmentation, acne and rosacea. And this is where Dr Allem and Snyders challenged a misconception I’ m guilty of, too: believing expensive skincare automatically means I’ m taking excellent
66 | SPRING 2026 • rovesa. co. za