The case for 24-hour wellness — why we never close

Most bathhouses in Sydney close at 9pm. We don't. Sonder runs 24 hours a day, every day of the year. That's the headline feature, but the why behind it is worth a longer look — because the reason isn't gimmick, it's Bankstown.

Western Sydney runs on a different clock

Bankstown is one of the most diverse, hardest-working pockets of Sydney. Hospital shift workers from Bankstown-Lidcombe and Liverpool. Truck drivers on the M5 corridor. Nurses, baristas, security guards, hospo staff, parents of small children who exist on broken sleep, students cramming through the night. People whose workday doesn't end at 5pm — or doesn't start until midnight.

For these people, a wellness space that closes at 9pm isn't a wellness space. It's a wellness space for other people. And that mattered to us when we started planning Sonder.

The 3am soak is a different experience

A weekend afternoon at any bathhouse is loud-ish, busy, social. That's not a bad thing — connection is one of the genuine benefits of communal bathing. But it's not the only kind of session worth having.

A 3am soak is something else entirely. Three or four other guests in the whole space. The lights low. The water steaming gently. The cold plunge waiting, patient. The kind of quiet you can hear your own heartbeat through.

For shift workers coming off a long night, this is the difference between going home wired and going home actually able to sleep. For parents, it's 90 minutes where nobody needs anything from you. For night owls, it's the only time of day the world feels slow enough to match.

"Wellness shouldn't be a luxury reserved for people whose schedules look like everyone else's."

Who actually uses a 24/7 bathhouse

From the bathhouse data we've seen in markets where 24-hour facilities exist — Tokyo, Seoul, parts of Reykjavik and Helsinki — overnight visitors break down into a few clear groups:

• Shift workers and emergency services. Coming off 12-hour overnight shifts, decompressing before sleep.
• Parents of young children. The only 90 minutes of the day that genuinely belong to them.
• Night-shift hospitality staff. Finishing at 1 or 2am, not ready to go home, not interested in a bar.
• Insomniacs and shift-sleepers. People whose bodies just don't run on the 9–5 sleep clock.
• Couples and friends with mismatched schedules. Sometimes 11pm is the first window two adults have together.
• Early-morning anti-rushers. 5am soak before work — quieter than the gym, more restorative, sets up the whole day.

Operations: how we make it work safely

A 24/7 wellness facility is harder to run than a 12-hour one — there's no question. The way we've designed Sonder to handle it:

• Staff on site at every hour. Never a moment without supervision.
• Strict 18+ policy. Keeps the environment consistent overnight without compromise.
• CCTV in all common areas. Never in change rooms or treatment rooms — but enough oversight to keep things safe.
• Code-based entry after hours. Booked guests only, no walk-ins between 10pm and 6am.
• Off-peak pricing overnight. Our quietest hours are also our most affordable — the Early Bird rate applies through much of the night.

The bigger point

Wellness, as an industry, has historically been built around people whose lives look a particular way: predictable hours, weekend free time, money to spend on optional self-care. That's fine — those people exist and deserve good wellness spaces too.

But it's also been built around people whose lives don't look that way: people whose hours are unpredictable, whose weekends are work days, whose self-care happens (if it happens at all) in the gaps between everything else.

Sonder isn't a 24-hour bathhouse because it's a cool marketing angle. It's a 24-hour bathhouse because the people of Bankstown deserve a wellness space that fits their actual lives. The 3am soak is the proof that we mean it.

Curious to come in for an overnight session? See our session options, read our first-visit guide, or check the 24/7 access section of our FAQ for everything about how overnight visits work.