The Hotel Guest Checks Out Tomorrow. Why Should the Wellness Customer Leave Too?

Hotels have traditionally treated wellness as part of the overnight stay. A guest books a room, schedules a massage, uses the pool or fitness center, and leaves. The hotel then waits for another traveler to arrive.

That model is starting to look unnecessarily limited.

A hotel may have spent millions of dollars building a spa, pool, fitness center, treatment rooms and other wellness facilities. Those assets do not disappear when occupancy falls on a Tuesday afternoon or during a slower season. The people living and working around the hotel may represent a second customer base that can use the same facilities throughout the year.

Some hotels are already moving in this direction. In June 2026, Four Seasons Hotel New York Downtown introduced Club 27, a private wellness membership designed for both travelers and local residents. Members receive access to the hotel’s fitness center, exercise studio, infrared sauna, steam room and 75-foot indoor pool, along with preferred spa rates, classes, guest privileges and other benefits.

Gaylord Texan Resort also markets spa memberships specifically to local guests. Members can use the spa lounge, locker rooms, sauna and steam room, receive discounts and, at premium levels, receive a monthly treatment.

This raises an interesting business question for hotels: Should the wellness department operate partly as a local membership business rather than relying primarily on hotel guests?

For the right property, the economics deserve serious consideration.

Hotels Already Own the Expensive Part

Starting a standalone wellness club requires a building, treatment rooms, showers, equipment, pools or thermal facilities, staff and considerable upfront investment. Many hotels already have most of this infrastructure.

That creates an unusual opportunity. The question is not necessarily whether a hotel should build another wellness business. It is whether it can earn more from assets it already owns.

The latest U.S. spa numbers make that worth examining. The International Spa Association’s 2026 study, conducted by PwC, reports that U.S. spa revenue reached a record $23.5 billion in 2025, up 4.2% from the previous year. Spa visits increased to 191 million, while average revenue per visit reached $123.10. Resort and hotel spas performed particularly well on spending, averaging approximately $181 per visit, compared with about $110 at day spas.

Those numbers show that hotel spas can attract high-value customers. The weakness of the traditional model is that the customer relationship is often temporary. Someone may spend $300 during a weekend stay and then disappear for another year.

A local member is different. That customer may pay every month, visit regularly, purchase treatments, bring guests, eat at the hotel, and attend events. The hotel is no longer trying to make money from one spa appointment. It is building a longer customer relationship.

Membership Changes the Revenue Pattern

Recurring revenue is attractive because it gives management something hotel spas do not always have: a more predictable base of business.

Recent industry data from Zenoti shows why spa operators are paying attention. Its 2026 spa benchmark research reports that membership sales continued growing during 2025 even while new guest visits weakened. Its analysis also found that top-performing spas with membership programs generate more revenue than comparable businesses without them, although membership performance depends heavily on keeping customers engaged.

The basic mathematics are simple. Suppose a hotel develops a local wellness club with 300 members paying an average of $175 per month. That represents $52,500 in monthly dues, or $630,000 annually, before members buy a massage, facial, personal training session, meal or hotel stay.

At 600 members, the same pricing would produce $1.26 million in annual membership revenue.

That does not mean the money is profit. Members increase laundry, staffing, utilities, maintenance, and facility usage. A crowded pool or fitness center can also reduce the experience for hotel guests. But the model demonstrates why an existing wellness facility can become financially more interesting when it serves customers 365 days a year.

A recent UK wellness initiative makes the same argument at a larger scale. Invest in Wellbeing estimates that a hotel wellness operation with 1,200 members paying £110 monthly could produce more than £1.5 million in annual recurring revenue, using existing hotel wellness assets rather than building a large destination spa.

The important phrase is “existing assets.” Membership economics become much less attractive if a hotel must spend millions building new facilities just to create the program.

The Member Can Spend Beyond the Spa

The bigger opportunity may be what happens outside the membership fee.

The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island has a members club that illustrates the broader model. Membership includes spa and wellness access, but benefits also extend to the beach, pools, dining, resort events, preferred spa pricing, and even hotel stays.

This turns the hotel into something closer to a local lifestyle club.

A member may come for a workout in the morning, have lunch at the property, book a massage another week, bring a guest to the pool, and later use the hotel for an anniversary weekend. The hotel has created several opportunities to earn revenue from someone who does not need an overnight room every time they visit.

This matters because wellness can become a customer-acquisition channel for the rest of the property. A local resident who would never think of walking into a luxury hotel simply for dinner may become comfortable with the property after visiting the wellness club every week.

That relationship can also work in the opposite direction. A business traveler who regularly stays with a hotel brand may be interested in a wellness membership near home. A local member may choose the same hotel brand when traveling. The wellness relationship can strengthen the larger hospitality relationship.

But Membership Can Damage the Hotel Experience

Hotels also have to be careful about how many local memberships they sell. Hotel guests are still the priority. Someone paying $700 a night will not be happy if the pool is crowded and there is nowhere to sit. The same applies to the spa and fitness center. If those facilities were designed mainly for hotel guests, adding too many local members could quickly make the experience worse for everyone.

The business therefore needs a capacity model before it needs a membership brochure.

Management should know when facilities are busiest, which areas have unused capacity, and how demand changes by day and season. Membership can then be designed around that information.

A city hotel might have relatively quiet wellness facilities during weekday daytime hours but heavy demand on weekends. A resort could have substantial capacity during the local off-season but almost none during holiday periods. Membership privileges do not have to be identical every day of the year.

Hotels can use reservation requirements, member caps, blackout periods, different membership levels, and time-specific access to protect the overnight guest experience.

This is one reason an exclusive membership may make more sense than an inexpensive one. The objective should not necessarily be to sign as many people as possible. A smaller number of higher-value members can generate meaningful revenue without overwhelming the property.

The Membership Has to Be More Than Pool Access

Another risk is creating what is effectively an expensive gym membership inside a hotel.

If members pay premium prices, the experience needs to justify them. That does not mean adding endless expensive technology. It means giving members reasons to keep using the property.

Four Seasons’ Club 27 combines physical facilities with treatments, training, yoga, meditation, guest access, hotel benefits and wellness events. The Ritz-Carlton model connects wellness with dining, beach access and social events. These programs make the membership broader than access to exercise equipment.

The social side may be particularly important. A monthly wellness breakfast, small speaker program, walking group, healthy cooking event or member evening costs relatively little compared with building another treatment room. It also gives members another reason to maintain the relationship.

The hotel does not need to provide everything itself. Local physicians, wellness practitioners, nutrition companies, fitness specialists and wellness brands could participate in selected programs. Some could eventually become commercial partners or sponsors, creating another source of revenue around the membership community.

The Numbers Need to Work at the Customer Level

A hotel considering membership should calculate more than the monthly dues.

Suppose a member pays $200 a month, producing $2,400 annually. During the year, that member also purchases four treatments at $180 each, spends $600 in restaurants, attends two paid wellness events, and books one weekend stay.

The member may be worth considerably more than the original $2,400.

Now compare that with a member who pays $99 per month, uses the pool four times a week, rarely purchases anything else and increases the need for staffing and maintenance. That customer may produce recurring revenue while consuming a disproportionate amount of capacity.

Both count as one member. Financially, they are very different.

Hotels should therefore watch revenue per member, additional spa spending, food and beverage spending, facility usage, retention, and the cost of servicing the membership. A membership program with 800 people is not automatically better than one with 350.

You can see the same idea in larger wellness clubs. Life Time had nearly 32 million visits during the first three months of 2026. Average revenue per membership increased from $844 to $930 compared with the same period a year earlier. The company makes money from memberships, but members also spend money on other services while they are at the clubs.

A hotel should not try to become Life Time. The useful lesson is that recurring membership and additional on-property spending can reinforce each other.

MG Idea: Sell the Empty Hours

MG Wellness & Travel would start by looking at unused wellness capacity rather than membership demand.

For 60 to 90 days, management could map spa, pool, fitness, and thermal-area usage by hour and day. The hotel may discover that Saturday afternoon is effectively full while Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. has significant unused capacity.

The hotel could start small, perhaps with 100 to 150 local members, instead of opening membership to everyone. Members could have easier access during the times when the spa, pool, and fitness center are usually less busy, along with a few additional hotel benefits.

The hotel could then measure membership revenue, spa purchases, restaurant spending, visits per member, cancellations, and whether hotel guests experience any reduction in service quality.

After six months, management would have something much more useful than an industry forecast: actual evidence showing what local customers are worth to that particular property.

If the numbers work, membership can expand. If they do not, the hotel has tested the idea without turning the entire spa operation upside down.

A Hotel Can Have Two Wellness Markets

Hotel wellness has traditionally been built around the traveler because the traveler was already there. That does not mean the traveler has to remain the only customer.

The local market offers something hospitality businesses usually struggle to obtain: repeat customers who can visit every week without occupying a hotel room.

For properties with strong wellness facilities and unused capacity, that can change the economics. The spa becomes less dependent on occupancy. The fitness center becomes a revenue-producing asset. Restaurants gain local customers. Wellness events gain a built-in audience. The hotel itself becomes part of people’s regular lives rather than somewhere they visit once a year.

Not every property should do it. Hotels with limited facilities, heavy resort demand or serious capacity constraints may be better off protecting the overnight experience.

But where the infrastructure already exists and sits underused for significant parts of the week, there is a reasonable question management should ask:

Why keep waiting for the next wellness customer to check into the hotel when thousands of potential customers already live nearby?

Research Sources