Make your gym work out for you

Aug 27, 2009

AL KAMDA

PRECOR

According to Precor export manager for EMEA, Derek Burke, the key mistake hoteliers make where their leisure offering is concerned is not treating their gym as a separate profit centre.

“This means they don’t fully understand the value of their health club and often don’t invest sufficient funds in maintaining it. The result is outdated equipment and insufficient staff training, which in turn leads to a poor guest experience,” says Burke.

Therefore, his top three tips for maximising the success of a hotel gym are as follows:

Create and deploy innovative ways to promote, communicate and otherwise display fitness and wellness programmes in a visually appealing manner on the hotel website. For frequent travellers making hotel choices, fitness and wellness features are currently treated as something of a checkmark, largely because most major hotel brands fail to promote those programmes on their hotel websites. Often, the fitness centre offering is limited to a mention as a property amenity, buried on a list of other amenities.
Elevating the visibility of the fitness centre for travellers increases the likelihood of attracting the fitness-minded — many of whom are not brand loyal, even when they participate in hotel loyalty programmes.
Deliver a consistently superior fitness centre experience through high-quality, recognisable brand equipment with superior biomechanics. Precor has found that fitness-minded consumers are acutely aware of their physical interactions with the equipment; this includes the “look and feel” as well as their overall perceptions of durability. Some, but by no means the majority, of these travellers believe the major brand manufacturers create “home-use” and “commercial-grade” equipment, with the former being far inferior to the latter. In short, to create an authentic, branded fitness experience, it is critical to install equipment of an equivalent quality to what one would encounter in a professional fitness centre.
The ideal branded fitness centre experience should: be located on the highest floor possible; have as direct access as possible to an elevator; and provide views to the outside world. Many consumers, especially women, express significant concern about the location of many fitness centres in heavily trafficked areas. Likewise, Precor found that many consumers were unanimous in their disdain for fitness centres either located in basements or lacking any windows to the outside world.

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