Fitness For Hospitality

With the growing health consciousness, fitness consciousness is also rising in urban Indian society. The need for visiting gyms has become more pronounced among the upper echelons of urban India, though urban middle-class India is also getting swayed if not swept by the fitness wave.

- Swarnendu Biswas

For many urban Indians visiting spas and gyms are graduating or have already graduated from lifestyle statements to integral part of one’s journey towards a fit and healthy life.

The need to meet the demands of hectic lifestyles, the need to counter the spate of lifestyle diseases, both of which are affecting sizeable population in urban India, growing health consciousness and increase in disposable incomes in select pockets of urban Indian society have together given a fillip to the fitness business in India, which is easily reflected in the mushrooming of gyms across our urban Indian space. Though the fitness industry in India is largely unorganised, it is growing at an impressive pace.

In metros and other big cities of India, it is not at all rare to find a gym or more than one gym, even in a middle-class locality. No wonder we find gyms in high end hotels in the country as a common feature, as many business and leisure travellers wouldn’t like disrupting their regular fitness routine, even while on travel. However, our hospitality industry should be more proactive in tapping the lucrative revenue earning potential of the growing fitness business in the country.

Though gym in five-star hotels across the country has emerged as a mandatory requirement, but there is no reason to believe that a leisure traveller or a business traveller staying in a three-star or a two-star hotel would not mind skipping her/his everyday exercise regimen just because she/he is travelling.

It is about time for the Indian hotel industry to adopt the fitness culture more vigorously, considering the fact that the demand for visits to gyms has already percolated from the upper echelons of the urban Indian society to the urban upper middle class and middle middle-class India, in a not too insignificant manner.