In a recent Instagram post promoting the Boram postpartum retreat, a fresh-faced new mom strolls her newborn through the grand doors of a Manhattan hotel. Presumably, she was discharged from the hospital minutes earlier, though you’d never guess it. She’s beaming in a slick bun and sundress, bright-eyed about the relaxing days ahead. Because rather than taking her baby home for sleepless nights, she’s doing the first days of motherhood differently — or, more specifically, luxuriously.
Over the past few years, a steady stream of momfluencer posts for Boram have followed a similar formula: The mom stays in a vast sunlit hotel room with park views, and her camera scans to some mix of the following: Coterie diapers, a wooden bassinet, fresh grapes. There are footbaths and face masks and postnatal massages, too. And instead of subsisting on greasy takeout or frozen entrées from Trader Joe’s, the influencer enjoys room service designed for postpartum recovery. With gleaming silverware, she punctures poached eggs with perfectly runny yolks and digs into carrot-ginger soup for lunch and charred salmon for dinner. Her husband is so carefree he breaks into a silly dance or reclines in a bathrobe on the bed with a copy of a parenting book he picked up in the lounge, Dr. Becky Kennedy’s Good Inside. From the posts, it seems practical matters at Boram are a breeze too: Moms can call on a lactation consultant for breastfeeding support on demand and leave their infant in the nursery to get some rest or take a walk in Central Park at a moment’s notice. A date night is on the table too.
“Postpartum is something you were never meant to do alone,” Boram’s website reads. “It takes a village. We’re here to be your village.”
When the Boram retreat opened on Mother’s Day weekend 2022, it was the first in the United States to target a high-end clientele, and it is still the only overnight postpartum retreat in New York City. The concept is enticing, but former guests say the $1,000-a-night reality hasn’t always lived up to the advertising.
The business’s singularity may be at the core of its mixed reviews. Boram is a radical newcomer to the American market, and because of that, it sits in a lightly regulated, competitor-free space. Boram is neither a medical nor child-care facility or even a hotel. It is a service that has rented a floor of hotel rooms and turned two of them into a nursery and a mothers’ lounge. While its landlord must adhere to city regulations, Boram itself sets its own safety, hiring, and care standards and processes, with seemingly no one but the guests to report if anything goes awry.
In my correspondence with about a dozen Boram clients and another dozen maternal-health experts in New York, some raved about their stays and interactions with Boram. “The whole experience was so refreshing that I cried a lot when I had to leave. It was exactly the rejuvenating experience I needed — and that every mother needs and deserves,” says Fiana Tulip, a New Jersey mother who stayed at Boram for five nights in January. But others told me they feared for their babies’ health and safety while racking up extra bills for Seamless orders and Duane Reade runs. Some called the courses Boram offers “very informative”; others found them riddled with product sponsorships or even canceled, with one saying she was placated with a prerecorded video to watch in her room. (Co-founder Boram Nam says that, as a policy, videos are offered only as supplements to hands-on support, not as a replacement for it.) In the span of just over two years, the retreat has taken up occupancy at three different hotels. Many guests spoke about poorly designed and sparsely stocked rooms. There were no Coterie diapers, one said, and the refrigerator in the lounge was stocked with just a few Kirkland-brand snacks. Nam says Boram launched with a partnership with Coterie in place but now “utilizes different brands to best serve their guests.”
Grace, a 43-year-old lawyer who lives in Brooklyn, learned about Boram from a New York Times article before she became pregnant. “This is like heaven for postpartum patients,” one OB/GYN turned guest said in the story. A nursing assistant added that moms leave feeling both rested and confident. “I remember thinking, Oh my gosh, when I have a baby — if I have a baby — this sounds like exactly the kind of place where I’d want to heal. Everything I’ve ever heard about having a baby, it’s always like how scary it feels to come home,” says Grace, whose name has been changed. She and her husband spent years undergoing fertility treatments and grieving a loss; saving up for a stay at Boram felt like a hopeful act.
So when Grace finally got pregnant last year, she called Boram to make a weeklong reservation when she was about five months along. (Like a baby’s due date, a mom’s arrival date at Boram is an estimate. Parents-to-be typically put down a deposit for three, five, or seven nights, which they can cancel up to 14 days in advance of their predicted check-in date.) “I thought, What better way to spend my money than to be in a really safe, nurturing space, not just for me but my baby, too?” Grace says.
When Grace learned about Boram, the retreat was located at the Langham hotel on Fifth Avenue, but by the time her baby was born this past spring, it had moved to the Thompson Central Park hotel on West 56th Street. The move gave her husband pause, but Grace was unfazed. Not long into her stay, however, it occurred to Grace that perhaps there was a better way to spend her money. The first red flag: She had been discharged with instructions to monitor her high blood pressure, but Boram had only one blood-pressure cuff. When another mom requested it, Grace was asked to relinquish it after only a day or two and complied. Then she noticed the live cam in the nursery, though functional, was focused on a piece of furniture, not on her infant. When she repeatedly asked if it could be repositioned, nothing changed. Her meals often came late. She sent her husband back to their apartment to stock up on pads, diaper cream, swaddles, and bottles since the alternative — constantly texting the Boram staff for more of the stringently rationed materials — was too tiring.
The only additions to the standard hotel-room furniture were a wheeled bassinet and a nursing pillow. “Nothing was done to make the room more amenable to the first few days after you have a baby,” Grace says. “I was shocked by that.” In contrast to the bright, suite-size escapes featured on social media, her room was square and dark.
Grace’s husband wanted to check out, but Grace wanted to make the best of things. Though when she learned her daughter hadn’t been fed for four hours during an overnight nursery stay — nearly double the time doctors said the jaundiced baby needed between feedings — Grace started to cry and requested an early checkout. “It was the week after I gave birth, when everything felt like life or death,” Grace says. “I literally was like, ‘Oh my God, is she going to make it?’”
Grace’s refund request for the unused days was denied. But, a staffer asked, might she fancy a free massage? No, she did not. She wanted to go home. And yet she had asked for this — paid nearly $7,000 for this — too.
Later that day, Grace returned to the hotel following a doctor’s appointment and discovered the key card to her room had been deactivated. Boram’s team blamed the hotel; hotel staff said they had no record that she had even been a guest there. Grace regained access about an hour later and promptly left, forfeiting the cost of her final night’s stay.
Naomi checked into Boram after the birth of her first baby in spring 2024. She too felt enticed by Boram’s Instagram Reels and, as a Chinese American, wanted to experience certain aspects of the traditional “confinement period” after birth. She expected the Boram team to be more attentive to nonmedical requests, such as help with her breast pump, than the hospital staff had been. But she says the reverse turned out to be true.
For Naomi, the breastfeeding support included someone else unboxing her pump, handing her a piece of paper “with someone else’s notes,” and leaving the room. “I felt extremely lost, and had I not had some knowledge from the nurses at the hospital I came from, I don’t know how I would have fed my child,” she says. “I found myself texting into a void and waiting long periods for a response, with care members walking in unannounced.” She never felt comfortable enough to leave her baby in the nursery.
Despite plans to stay at Boram for a week, Naomi, whose name has also been changed, checked out after one night — and was charged a $485 cancellation fee. “It did not feel worth it,” she says.
Another mom, whose identity has been verified, wrote a foreboding 2024 Google review: “Boram is not a retreat. It is random hotel rooms on a floor barely equipped with items for baby or postpartum self-care, and minimally trained workers capable of doing a very limited number of tasks to care for mom/baby.” The mom added, “The whole operation is unbelievably disorganized, unprofessional, and feels like a scam. Stay away — I do not know what is going on here.”
She was also offered a free massage when she tried to leave early. Unlike Grace, she accepted. It was “actually sublime,” she wrote.
Nam says negative reviews like Naomi’s and Grace’s can often be chalked up to expectation management. “I’ve worked in the service industry ever since I was 16, and you will always have guests or clients that will complain about literally everything,” she says. “You just can’t have a service in this day and world that will appease everyone.”
The idea for Boram, she says, sprang from her personal battle with postpartum depression. After the birth of her second child, she struggled to recover from a C-section while parenting two children and returning to work. She and her husband, Suk Park, had the financial reserves to open a getaway for well-heeled new parents. Park had co-founded DramaFever, a streaming service focused on Korean dramas, and Nam was on the start-up’s founding team. The company was sold for an estimated $80 to $140 million to SoftBank in 2014, and the pair invested $1.5 million of their earnings to launch Boram — which means “fruits of one’s labor” in Korean — in 2017, raising an additional $2.7 million from investors.
Nam and Park modeled Boram on the postnatal centers their friends enjoyed in Korea, where they’re from. “Boram really began from a personal struggle because I didn’t have the structure, care, or support compared to what women were getting in Asia,” Nam says. The centers in Korea — called sanhujoriwon — are often government subsidized and government regulated, she explains. Boram, by contrast, is essentially just a service operating on a floor of a boutique hotel. Because it doesn’t offer medical care — staffers can’t even dispense Tylenol — it’s not classified as a health-care facility. And because parents tend to remain on site (though they are encouraged to leave the premises for a walk or a meal), it’s not a child-care facility, either, according to the city’s Department of Health. The business is thus able to avoid the background and safety checks required of a day-care center and the sterilization procedures the city enforces for hospitals and even spas. (For its part, Boram says it follows strict sterilization protocols.) In fact, Boram is not subject to any more scrutiny than the hotel’s other floors are, and the city will inspect it only when there’s a public complaint. Per the Department of Buildings, that has happened to Boram just once.
In May 2024, an anonymous member of the public called 311 to report a postpartum business operating illegally on a floor of the Thompson hotel. While the hotel’s property owner is obligated to obtain a Certificate of Occupancy with the city’s Department of Buildings to detail how its various floors are being used, the Thompson’s owner had not done so.
When a joint team from the DOB, the FDNY, and the Department of Health checked it out, they confirmed the rooms on Boram’s floor “were being illegally occupied by this postnatal care business,” Andrew Rudansky, the DOB’s press secretary, says. Had Boram been appropriately documented by the Thompson, it might have been subject to a variety of city codes related to safety, accessibility, and occupancy limits, he adds. Still, the consequence was minor: The property owner — not Boram — was fined $1,250. The company later provided “evidence that the hotel rooms had been converted back to their prior legal condition,” Rudansky says.
Four months after the complaint, in September of this year, Boram moved again — this time to its current location at the Park Lane New York on Central Park South. A DOB spokesperson says the business’s current property owner hasn’t obtained a new certificate of occupancy listing a postpartum-care facility for the retreat’s floor either, but because the DOB has not received a complaint about its use, it has not conducted a field inspection to investigate the site.
The Langham hotel didn’t respond to requests for comment about its relationship with Boram, but Nam says guest feedback drove the first relocation to the Thompson. The five-star Langham has marble bathtubs, which aren’t ideal for postpartum moms who have been advised not to submerge their bodies in water, while the four-star Thompson has walk-in showers. At the Thompson, Boram guests could be corralled onto one floor, whereas at the Langham, they were scattered. It was cheaper for Boram and its guests, too. A spokesperson for the Thompson “respectfully declined” to answer why the partnership — walk-in showers and all — had ended after just about a year. Nam says the shift was related to a contract ending as well as Park Lane New York’s tighter security and larger rooms. At the Park Lane, hotel guests must use a key card for floor access via the elevators. “It is possible for hotel guests from other floors to get off on our floor,” says Nam, so Boram gives their guests identifying wristbands to wear. They also have multiple security cameras, including one inside the nursery.
Boram’s employee roster is a mix of registered nurses, certified nursing assistants (a credential that takes a few weeks to achieve), postpartum doulas, and what Nam calls “baby specialists.” She also says 12 members of Boram’s care team are certified lactation specialists, while others are in the midst of a training program. The company opened with one international-board-certified lactation consultant — the gold standard in lactation care, requiring hundreds of hours of training and passing an exam — on its staff and hired a second 18 months ago. Nam adds that 80 percent of her staff work full time while 20 percent are part-time employees working two or more shifts per month. No physicians are affiliated with the retreat.
Kim Kushner is a postpartum doula and childbirth educator who worked at Boram for a few months in 2023 when it was housed at the Thompson. She says she was startled by what she saw behind the scenes. Leadership failed to provide her with fire-drill instructions, and Kushner once came across a Snoo bassinet that wasn’t properly grounded to a power strip, raising the risk of electric shock or fire. She says she was instructed to ration menstrual pads and baby formula to prevent theft and moms were given one-size-fits-all breast-pumping accessories. At least once, she said, there was a breast-milk mixup, in which baby A was accidentally fed the milk of baby B’s mom, a mistake that happened because all the bottle parts were washed and stored together. “Moisture happens, tags fall off or get lost, because you can’t take care of 15 or however many women milking and everything else,” Kushner explains.
After she brought enough of her “suggestions for improvement,” as she puts it, to management, she was let go. Nam didn’t comment on Kushner’s experience, but says she was terminated “for failing to adhere to our safety standards and other misconduct.”
Yasmine, who has been a postpartum doula and lactation consultant for four years and asked to use a pseudonym, interviewed at Boram but ultimately decided the retreat’s honorable mission failed to make up for the $25 per hour wage she says it offered. She also worried that the credentials the business sought weren’t specific or advanced enough to deliver appropriate care. “They market it as ‘Doulas will be on the floor, lactation consultants will be on the floor,’ but the role I was interviewing for, you do not need to be a doula — you could be a nursing assistant with no experience,” she says.
For Nam, Boram is the first step in a larger mission to make elevated postpartum care mainstream across the nation. “We need to increase awareness, expand to other regions, work with the insurance provider. These are all in the plan, but we have to start from somewhere,” she says. She adds that employees at Meta and Amazon are already having parts of their stay covered by their company benefits. When asked about the retreat’s regulatory oversight, she responds confidently, albeit vaguely: “We prioritize hiring individuals with strong, relevant experience in newborn and maternal care, selecting those who bring valuable expertise to our team.” She adds that the particulars of the company’s hiring practices are confidential but that staffers are vetted through résumé reviews, interviews, references, and background checks. She also says Boram “fully complies with city regulations and meets all required safety and operational standards for our specialized setting.”
Despite what some perceive as early difficulties, Boram still has plans to expand. There are eight cribs in the nursery now; in January, Nam says, it will have 13. On a larger scale, the business has raised an additional $3 million in seed funding to open a second location in an undisclosed city and to staff up Boram Anywhere, a just-launched virtual platform that will deliver some of the retreat’s educational offerings to moms who can’t access an in-person stay. For $20 a month, new parents can watch classes on newborn care, read guides on topics like lactation, and connect with other members via a discussion forum. For an extra $200, they will receive four one-on-one virtual sessions with a “postnatal coach,” too.
Several postpartum experts felt the retreat’s benevolent mission and its visionary founder should supersede any criticism of its execution. “Why do women tear women down? I don’t want to be part of that,” one maternal-mental-health expert says. And several former guests questioned the point of examining a mostly good thing. After all, they say, what if what’s actually wrong with your stay at Boram is you? In the words of one Long Island mom who stayed there in 2022, “You don’t know what’s hormones and what just sucks.”
Rachel Beider, owner of a massage business in Brooklyn who stayed at Boram in February 2024, told me she was relieved when it was time to check out. The retreat had run out of the proper nipples for its bottles and did not have any formula her baby could drink because the only one on hand was cow’s-milk based. The baby cam was malfunctioning, she adds. (Nam says the hotel Wi-Fi can make the service spotty but staff members troubleshoot it promptly if a parent complains.) And whenever Beider tried to order the vegetarian option from Boram’s menu, the voice on the line told her they didn’t know what she was talking about and sent up unseasoned steamed veggies instead, forcing her to order additional food from Seamless. “I hate to complain about those sorts of things, but when you’re paying that kind of money,” she says, trailing off. “I don’t want to be the Fyre Fest people complaining about their cheese and bread.”
And she is grateful for the quiet time she had with her baby. “The best part of Boram for me was just hanging out in bed with my baby, no distractions, and I will be forever grateful for that,” she says. “Could I have spent that time in a regular hotel room? Sure, for a lot less money and, you know, room service.”
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