Developed for Hotel Executive – now shared here on RLAGlobal.com.
Reprinted from the Hotel Business Review with permission from: Hotel Executive.
Written by Simon Lee Saunders, VP of Strategic Health & Wellness at RLA Global.
Wellness for many hotel operators have traditionally meant either a functional gym or a spa with pools and sauna, various treatments and the promise of temporarily escaping everyday problems.
These models have served hotels well for around several decades, but they seem rather incomplete or insufficient today as customers increasingly want a holistic wellness experience that regularly improves their wellbeing, in multiple ways.
Evolving customer expectations have supported the rise of the social wellness club, a fairly new model that combines hospitality, spa, fitness, recovery, F&B and community - a lifestyle platform that changes the overall business logic of hotels.
Turning amenities into an operating model
Traditional hotel spas usually offer occasional indulgence to guests and commercially rely on occupancy, capture rate and the customer’s willingness to spend. This can be considered a limitation for most spas, even for those that operate profitably.
Today’s customers do not want wellness to be just an every-so-often experience, they increasingly seek to integrate it into their everyday lives, how they train, recover, work, eat, socialize and spend discretionary time. In this sense, traditional spas or gyms may not do the trick anymore to meet customer needs and maximize revenue flow.
Social wellness clubs transform spas and gyms from complementary amenities into parts of a wider ecosystem. This is a key distinction, as a spa or a gym is somewhere customers visit, but a social wellness club can be somewhere they belong.
Bringing in steady and recurring revenue
It is quite easy to understand why social wellness clubs can be an attractive business proposition for operators and investors. While a hotel guest staying for two or three nights may use the spa once during the trip, a social wellness club member may visit four times a week. They might train here before work, use recovery facilities, return for a meeting or have lunch later, and even attend a member event in the evening.
All this is to demonstrate that social wellness club members can generate recurring membership revenue, support repeat spend in general, create stronger F&B demand, increase facility utilisation at different times of the day and help establish a deeper relationship with the consumer compared to traditional loyalty programmes.
Private members clubs are already doing it
The appealing potential of building a more integrated operating model around wellness didn’t go unnoticed by standalone private member clubs. Several players in this sector have already transformed traditional club culture into integrated lifestyle ecosystems that blur the boundaries between wellness and community building.
One example of a fast-expanding private club chain focusing on wellness is Saint Haven in Australia, which based its concept on merging immersive wellness experiences with social connections and aims to become a “second home” for members.
Wealthy private club members are also seeking comprehensive health and longevity services. Some clubs are positioning themselves as partners in this pursuit by offering access to cutting-edge health protocols. A few even offer extended stays that combine luxury accommodation with intensive wellness and health optimization.
Hotels are better placed than they think
The wellness shift is no longer limited to private members clubs and is now moving directly into hospitality. Hotels, in fact, may be better placed to build social wellness clubs than many standalone club operators, because they already understand it better that atmosphere is part of the entire offering or product.
The sequence of arrival at the hotel, the choreography of services, the scent, acoustics and lighting as well as the overall host culture are not just nice-to-have elements of concept or design, they can truly shape behaviour and evoke emotional response. The best hotels know how to make people feel looked after and deliver an environment that feels thoughtfully planned from the moment a guest enters.
This is a structural advantage for hotels, which understand layered and sophisticated guest experience better than most standalone operators. Building a more intelligent ecosystem instead of just adding more facilities and blending the spa, gym, café and lounge into one coherent lifestyle offering is a big opportunity.
Why wellness strategies still fall short
Many hotels fail to take this opportunity and ultimately miss the mark, because their wellness strategy focuses on product provision instead of behavioural relevance. They pay attention to service components and individual facilities, such as recovery lounges, smoothie bars, or a stylish co-working table near the pool.
But it takes more to create a social wellness club, which requires suitable programming and community events, among others. Hotels can become truly differentiated assets by creating attachment in a market otherwise characterised by transactions.
Credible social wellness clubs should be places where training, recovery, conversation, nutrition and social participation reinforce one another, build habits, create belonging and ultimately become part of a member’s identity. All in all, the proposition only becomes meaningful when the hotel creates reasons to return and stay longer.
Early movers in the wellness club scene
Some hotel brands have already dipped their toes in the social wellness club market. Six Senses launched the world’s first Six Senses Place at their new London property, which opened at The Whiteley mixed-use development in March 2026.
Six Senses Place is a “social and wellness members club”, with a concept in which the “Six Senses lifestyle meets the rhythm of the city with a beautiful ecosystem designed to encourage reconnection, community and high-tech wellness,” IHG Hotels & Resorts, the brand’s owner has said.
The club sits right above the lobby and offers a programming that is “intentional throughout the year” and aligns gatherings with “seasonal shifts and cultural rhythms, alongside talks and shared meals which explore self-development and reflective healing practices,” its operator has said.
The clearest example of an earlier-generation brand that helped lay the groundwork for converging the wellness club concept with hospitality is Equinox. Its proposition has long extended beyond gym access to include signature classes, personal training, spa, regenerative amenities and high-end club environments.
The company opened its flagship Equinox Hotel New York in 2019, in its first foray into hospitality, and has plans for new openings across the US as well as in other countries and territories, such as Saudi Arabia and Anguilla. The basic concept is that whenever guests stay at an Equinox Hotels property, they also become an Equinox Fitness Club member for the duration of their stay.
Local community changes the hotel’s energy
Social wellness clubs can anchor the hotel asset in the local market, solving one of the oldest weaknesses in hospitality, that is, the struggle to be part of daily life of the local environment or neighbourhood. Social wellness clubs can fix the issue by introducing a local customer base that has familiarity and emotional stake in the surroundings.
If done well, embedding the hotel in the local community can have an impact on the entire asset. Guests arrive to find not an empty gym or a quiet spa corridor, but a property full of social energy. The hotel starts to feel less like a property that people temporarily occupy and more like a place people actively choose to spend time in. “No empty hotel gyms here - you’ll be inspired by the local member community,” says Equinox Hotel New York on its website.
This community energy can be a significant advantage in the upper-upscale and luxury segments of hospitality, where atmosphere increasingly matters as much as specification. And just to emphasize again, more local users mean more resilience in revenue and profit generation, increased spend capture and deeper brand depth.
Benefits and risks for property developers
Social wellness clubs can have even more important implications for mixed-use and branded residential properties. They can become the social engine of the scheme, bringing more traffic to the ground floor, lifting repeat footfall, supporting residential offerings and creating a stronger sense of a destination. If access hierarchy is properly designed, social wellness clubs can simultaneously serve hotel guests, residents, members and local users.
Having said that, social wellness clubs may not be for every operator, as it is a more demanding operating model that requires programming, membership and community management, more thoughtful F&B considerations, not to mention staff who understand how to host rather than simply service.
Spatial planning must support cross-usage and dwell time and should provide, and above all, it should be clear what customer groups the overall proposition is really for. One likely trap or risk is that hotels or other assets start applying the social wellness label to what, in reality, are just incremental product upgrades.
The future of hotel wellness will be social
All in all, the next chapter of hotel wellness will not be defined by facilities, amenities or equipment alone, but by environment and social behaviour. To reiterate our key points, the winners will be those that can create environments where wellness becomes a repeated social behaviour rather than an occasional guest indulgence, and places that matter not only to travellers but to members of the local community as well.
Social wellness clubs is not simply a new trend, but a new hotel lifestyle strategy. While spa was the signature wellness story of last two twenty years or so, social wellness clubs may prove to become the defining one for the next twenty.
