Wellness Works – Hotel News Now Roundtable Series, Featuring

Wellness Article – Hotel News Now – Featuring Matthew Arrants, ISHC, CHAM

How hotels are investing in wellness Matthew Arrants, EVP of Pinnacle Advisory Group, said he appreciates a lot about the shift to greater wellness in the hotel industry, but there’s really one thing it comes down to for him. “As an asset manager, I’m all about ROI,” he said. He noted that differentiation in that space can come down to the facilities you provide. “I do think the fitness center is pretty critical to me,” he said. Expanding and investing in fitness centers has long been held as at best a necessary evil for asset managers and owners alike, but Arrants said it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t make financial sense in many cases. “We could see the demand, and we could measure the impact on demand immediately (following fitness center improvements),” he said. James Gould, principal at Horizon Hotel Group, said the financial component of it is making wellness-focused hotels more appealing in places outside the largest markets like New York and Seattle. He said his company is currently working on a property in Long Island City. Brunt said it can often be more difficult to adapt existing properties to today’s wellness needs than to address them with new builds. He said that often comes back to the fact that it’s hard to invest in revamping every part of a property all at once and there are several components of wellness that touch various parts of a hotel.