Hotels spend millions on room design, F&B, and spa facilities. The gym gets what is left over. That might be three treadmills, a cable machine from 2009, and a hook for towels that are usually missing.

We have scored tens of thousands of hotel gyms across the globe. The pattern is consistent: the gym is one of the most searched, most reviewed, and most complained-about facilities in a hotel, and it receives the least investment. That is not a design problem. It is a revenue problem.

The Guests Who Notice Are Your Most Valuable

Business travelers, high performers, and health-conscious professionals are not a niche. They represent a disproportionately large share of premium room nights, repeat bookings, and corporate contracts. And fitness matters to them before they book.

According to the BCD Travel Hotel Booking Trends 2025 report, 51% of business travelers actively seek hotels with gym, pool, or spa facilities when choosing accommodation. 41% actually use the hotel gym during their stay. These are not edge cases. These are your core midweek occupancy, and they arrive with expectations.

The gym also affects whether they come back. The same report shows that 73% of business travelers return to the same hotel when revisiting a destination. That loyalty is fragile. A guest who had a poor gym experience will not raise it at checkout. They will simply choose a competitor next time.

For a deeper look at what this data means for hotel operators, see our breakdown: Business Travelers Are Finally Prioritizing Hotel Gyms.

What Your GymFactor Score Is Telling Travelers Right Now

HotelGyms.com calculates a GymFactor score for every hotel. It is a 1 to 5 scale built on 50+ objective factors: equipment type and condition, weight range, cardio availability, cleanliness, layout, and amenities. Travelers check it before they book. It surfaces also on booking platforms via GYMR, our browser extension.

If your hotel is in our database, that score is visible right now. Our analysis of Tripadvisor’s Travelers’ Choice Award 2025 winners illustrates the problem clearly: 80% of the top 1% of hotels globally scored low on GymFactor. Award-winning properties, celebrated for hospitality, service, and rooms, consistently underperform on fitness. The world’s highest-rated hotel on Tripadvisor at the time of our analysis earned a GymFactor of 2 / 5.

Read the full analysis: The Hidden Truth Behind Tripadvisor’s Choice Awards.

If your listing is incomplete, out of date, or missing photos taken before the last renovation, your GymFactor may not reflect the actual quality of your facility. That is a problem you can fix. Claim your listing on HotelGyms.com, upload accurate photos, and confirm your current equipment. The more complete your data, the more accurately your score reflects reality.

The Platforms Are Not Helping You

Here is something worth knowing about how the major booking platforms handle your gym. Tripadvisor published a detailed breakdown of how their machine learning system selects the primary photo shown for each hotel. The logic layers business rules on top of visual attractiveness scores. One of those rules, stated directly in their engineering documentation: gym photos are suppressed because they do not drive bookings.

That means even if your hotel has a well-equipped, recently renovated gym and accurate photos to prove it, Tripadvisor’s algorithm may be hiding them from the travelers most likely to care.

This is not a Tripadvisor criticism. It reflects a rational platform decision based on aggregate booking behavior. But it has a direct consequence for your property: the guests who specifically want gym quality data are not finding it through the platforms they use most. They are left guessing, relying on a line of text in the amenities section, or scrolling through reviews that were never designed to tell them what they need to know.

The two gyms in our feature image are not from different properties. They are from the same hotel. The photo on the left is current. The one on the right is not. That gap is what travelers are navigating every time they try to research a hotel gym.

This is exactly the gap HotelGyms.com was built to fill.

The Problem With Relying on Reviews Alone

General hotel reviews aggregate everything: rooms, service, F&B, location. The gym gets a line, if it gets anything. Worse, the review ecosystem itself is unreliable. Between 20 and 30% of reviews on major travel platforms are estimated to be fake or incentivized, based on multiple studies reviewed on our platform. Some hotels actively delete negative feedback to protect their aggregate score.

A fitness-focused traveler reading through 200 general reviews to find two sentences about a treadmill is not getting a reliable signal. We covered this in detail here: Find the Perfect Hotel Gym for You.

The GymFactor is reproducible, comparable, and algorithm-based. It does not fluctuate with sentiment. A GymFactor of 2 / 5 is published as clearly as a 5 / 5. Hotels cannot pay to improve it. They have to earn it.

Where Most Hotel Gyms Fall Short

Across the hotels we have assessed, the most common gaps are consistent:

  • Equipment age and condition. Broken machines, mismatched kit from different eras, no maintenance schedule. Guests notice immediately and it sets the tone for their stay.
  • Weight range. Most hotel gyms stop at 22 kg (50 lbs) dumbbells. A guest who trains seriously will not find that acceptable.
  • Outdated or suppressed photos. Hotels frequently promote gyms using old imagery. And as noted above, even accurate photos may not surface on the platforms where guests are searching.
  • No guest guidance. No signage, no programming, no QR codes linking to workouts. Guests are left to figure out an unfamiliar space alone.
  • No access to expertise. A guest asks about personal training. The answer is “I’d have to check on that.” For a property charging premium rates, that is not a sufficient response.

None of these are expensive problems. They are overlooked ones.

How to Close the Gap

The starting point is your data. If your hotel is not listed on HotelGyms.com, or if your listing has not been updated recently, the score travelers are checking may not reflect what you have actually built. Claiming your listing takes minutes and ensures the data is working for you, not against you.

Beyond the listing, improving a hotel gym is a scoped, manageable project when approached with the right guidance. We work with equipment suppliers and fitness consultants who specialize in the hotel context. If you want a pointer in the right direction, get in touch and we can connect you with the right people for your property and budget.

The travelers who prioritize fitness are already checking your GymFactor score. The question is whether you are managing what they find.

Check your hotel’s GymFactor score and claim your listing at HotelGyms.com. Questions about improving your facility? Get in touch.