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 one’s good health. Just as it’s common knowledge that smoking is bad for nearly all life outcomes, the word is out amongst 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 amongst other ailments. The need to uphold one’s at-home regimen is already spurring more guest desire to stay active while travelling, 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 travellers are segmented, while 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 one’s 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 like healthy F&B (because everyone eats) or high-margin ancillary add-ons like 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.

Boomer Sarcopenia
The most salient concurrent driver is the aging of the baby boomers – the wealthiest generation on the planet for the rest of the 2020s – wherein a hallmark of bodily aging is a natural decline in muscle mass as well as muscle responsiveness, with ‘sarcopenia’ as one of a handful of medical terms to codify this steady, decades-long progression.

Sarcopenia explains why one’s grip strength is used as a marker for lifespan. For one, a firm squeeze is a heuristic for upper body muscle mass which is correlated with the level of activity a person maintains as they age and the health of the circulatory system.

But equally as significant is the ‘healthy user bias’ within scientific research on grip strength in that upper body muscle helps to prevent a fall from being fatal and therefore prolongs the lifespan of those that regularly lift weights versus that don’t. While the occasional trip or accident is a matter of chance, when you are able to do a pushup or forcefully brace onto a nearby tree branch, you are thus able to use your upper body strength as a ‘preventative’ force to lessen the momentum of a fall, reducing the damage of the impact. Lest we forget that it was only a century ago – before the days of acute healthcare – when ‘falling on the stairs’ or ‘tripping on the sidewalk’ was a common cause of death.

The medical community recognizes this relationship and doctors all over the world now recommend weightlifting to their patients. However, age-driven sarcopenia is usually accompanied by the loss of integrity in the joints, ligaments and tendons, leading to chronic pain that can prevent someone from working out at a high intensity. The big opportunity for hotels and resorts therefore resides in wellness programming that caters to the management and amelioration of this pain by way of various forms of physiotherapy, massage therapy, mobility training, isometrics, yoga, pilates, stretching classes, aquafit classes and tai chi.

Strength Versus Stability
In any discussion of physical exercise, it’s important to differentiate between strength training and stability, mobility or balance work, with the latter arguably far more important for longevity and overall quality of life.

When we speak of weightlifting, many still have a stereotypical image of brooding hunks doing bicep curls or chest presses. Far less often do we mentally conjure that of balancing on one foot, squatting on a BOSU ball or using a TRX suspension system. And for reference, when we speak of ‘mobility’ we are referring 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.

While classical barbell weightlifting is better able to drive up the heart rate and induce muscular hypertrophy for a metabolic, fat-burning boost, mobility and stability exercises work to improve mind-body connectivity, joint elasticity and the responsiveness of individual muscle striations (the units within a muscle) to thereby promote better bodily alignment and smoother joint tracking across the entirety of one’s range of motion. To put it bluntly, without joint stability, you would be in near-constant pain, preventing you from vigorously exercising and inevitably shortening your lifespan.

A simple way to think about this would be like comparing the human knee to a train chugging a track with two rails. That screeching sound a train makes as it rounds a curve results from an imbalance of weight or momentum on one side versus the other, which can be seen as analogous to the perceived pain from an uneven loading on the medial or lateral meniscus within the knee joint. Many in this situation would opt for a knee brace, but that’s only palliative and doesn’t correct the underlying issue. The real solution is to realign the loading of weight back onto the middle of the train tracks – in this case, the center of the knee – by looking at how certain muscles of the thigh are firing in tandem as well as the holistic functionality of the hip and ankle muscles.

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. Alas, we’re still coming out of the 20th-century educational system where gym teachers were basically goons not smart enough to teach any other subject. As it relates to travel, there’s a profound shift in one’s frame of mind as they are removed from the hamster wheel of familiar surroundings.

Hoteliers naturally know this; 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 onsite 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 their 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 their fitness branding.

While improving joint stability, balance and bodily mobility to thereby reduce joint pain and help to prevent fatal falls require vigilant consistency throughout one’s daily habits, hotels can be centers of inspiration to elicit that change for the better. This is what we would codify as ‘transformative experiences’ – those activities offered by hotels that encourage guests to improve their overall livelihoods, therein having a second-order effect of augmenting loyalty and customer lifetime value as said guests return for the next ‘booster’ of inspiration.

So, 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, assisted by sarcopenia and a loss of balance, 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, and hopefully from reading this article, you can see why demand for onsite fitness and mobility training will increase as time goes on.