My clients want to know what a property's fitness floor does on specific days and times. Not what the website promises or the schedule claims. What actually happens, who shows up for it, and what actions to take next.
I learned these approaches in graduate coursework on consumer behavior, where a good interview meant staying with one person long enough that they stopped giving me the answer they had ready. What matters usually arrives in the third question, the one nobody could have written in advance because it depends on how they answered the second.
But I've also seen it from the floor, and from the decision-makers' point of view.
Interviews start with whoever owns the outcome. Spa directors, programming leads, founders. The person who answers for occupancy and retention, not the person who answers for the brand deck.
Small sample, long conversations. Four properties understood completely beat forty surveyed and averaged.
The questions cover staffing ratios, equipment throughput, what guests book versus what the property promotes, and where programming quietly stops matching the space it lives in. Every report then separates three things: what the evidence supports, what it contradicts, and what stays unknown.
That last category matters most. Research that reports only its conclusions hides its own limits.
The same method runs on client engagements. Rebuilding an About page for a California therapeutics brand meant thirty to forty-five minutes each with five of the spas that carry its products, asking what they tell their own clients about it. The page that came out of those calls carried their customers' language, not only the founder's.
Wellness directors at destination spa properties. Founders and executives at recovery and performance technology companies. Owners and programming leads at independent studios.
Interviews stay unattributed by default. That policy buys more candor than an on-record conversation produces, and candor justifies the reporting in the first place. References available in a professional context.
Anyone can model a market from public data. Getting an operator to describe their floor honestly takes a different kind of relationship, and that relationship produces everything worth reading here.
Reporting that only explains the present dates quickly. These questions point where the work goes next.
An ongoing look at where hospitality fitness and wellness programming underdelivers against the investment behind it.
Current edition: 2026. Interviews conducted February—April, 2026.
This edition draws on long-form interviews with three operators, a review of public performance signals across comparable properties, and my own year inside a multi-studio training system. Properties buy the equipment, build the room, then staff it thin. Guests arrive fitter and better informed than the programming assumes. The gap between those two facts costs properties more than any marketing fix recovers.
The interview set stays open. Each new conversation revises the picture rather than confirming it.
In addition to proprietary reports for clients, reporting work shows up:
ISPA (International Spa Association). iLearn platform, "Future of the Spa Marketing Department" (December 2024). Pulse magazine, "Operational Inefficiencies" (June 2025) and "Gen Z & Sustainability" (February 2025).
Resort Fitness Intelligence Report. Primary interviews with fitness and spa leadership at destination properties and recovery technology brands, covering equipment selection, amenity budgets, and guest programming.
Published wellness writing. Medium and Thrive Global, covering spa and resort marketing, wellness technology reviews, mindfulness, and wellness leadership.