Is fitness a primary booking driver for hotels? Unless it’s a lifestyle brand specifically known for its exercise programming like Equinox or EVEN, the answer is a resolute no.
We can confidently say that a traveler’s purpose will most likely always center around location first, with price as a close-second attribute, for all those outside the luxury segment. However, there are a few significant trends that hoteliers should consider with respect to fitness that will influence how guests choose their properties and the rates they can command.
Fitness-Tertiary Travelers
The greatest overall force is that there is now a vast body of evidence for the relationship between consistent exercise and the maintenance of good health. Just as it’s common knowledge that smoking is bad for nearly all life outcomes, the word is out among members of every demographic group that exercise is beneficial, regardless of whether one chooses to do it.
The key word here is consistent in that it’s also recognized that a pittance every day is often better than a pound every week or month. This is the basis for the maxim, "Sitting is the new smoking," whereby a lack of low-intensity activity throughout the day — for instance, going for a brief walk once an hour to move the blood around — is now deemed a recipe for congestive heart disease among other ailments. The need to uphold an at-home regimen is already spurring more guest desire to stay active while traveling, especially in an on-the-go manner via quick in-room guided workouts or yoga stretching routines versus blocking off hours at time to head down to the fitness center.
Despite the rollout of these new fitness-oriented guestroom features, though, for most guests in 2023, they aren’t a "must-have" but a "nice-to-have." Similar to how wellness-oriented travelers are segmented, we may define fitness-secondary guests as those who choose a location first for various reasons and then narrow the query down to those hotels that have excellent exercise programming. Most customers will still fall into the fitness-tertiary camp, with location, price and other considerations coming ahead of curiosity for features that enable working out while abroad.
Within the broader wellness umbrella, this alone makes a far stronger argument for focusing on operations such as healthy food and beverage — because everyone eats — or high-margin ancillary add-ons such as selling more spa treatments and experiential activities with a wellness component. Therefore, the business case for fitness-oriented branding requires different factors to make it worthwhile.
Hotels Inspiring Change
If only everyone understood the fundamental importance of mobility, every single physiotherapist would have a full schedule and we’d have sweeping tax incentives in place for seeking out these professionals. And for reference, mobility refers to someone’s strength combined with their flexibility, as reflected in their ability to comfortably move their body across a wide range of motion at each discrete joint.
Hoteliers naturally know that guests are more receptive to new experiences they might not otherwise consider when at home. With the proper messaging and contextual targeting, a case can be made for both on-demand mobility training regimens as well as the incorporation of on-site guided experiences and group classes that are either packaged or served up as an extra expense.
The luxury resort segment excels in this area by weaving physiotherapy practices with broader wellness-primary and wellness-secondary programming. But with the overall aging of the population combined with the increasing number of younger travelers who recognize the value of exercise, the demand is there for hotels to deepen fitness branding.
Improving joint stability, balance and bodily mobility to thereby reduce joint pain and help to prevent fatal falls requires vigilant consistency throughout one’s daily habits. But hotels can be centers of inspiration to elicit that change for the better. This is what we would codify as "transformative experiences" — activities offered by hotels that encourage guests to improve their overall livelihoods, therein having a secondary effect of augmenting loyalty and customer lifetime value as said guests return for the next "booster" of inspiration.
To return to the opening question: Is fitness a primary booking driver? Currently, no, but it can be, and importantly it should be, because all it takes is one bad fall for your life to change forever. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say.
The most successful hotel brands in the near future will be those that identify a growing niche and work to serve it with approachable and appropriate experiences.
Adam and Larry Mogelonsky are partners of Hotel Mogel Consulting Ltd., a Toronto-based consulting practice. Larry focuses on asset management, sales and operations while Adam specializes in hotel technology and marketing.
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