80 Million Europeans Have Gym Memberships. Hotels Are Still Selling Them Pool Chairs and Basement Gyms.

By: Alicia

My husband and I have been trying to find the our ideal vacation in Europe for 4 years.

My husband wants to summit something. I want a flat trail around a lake that takes half a day, into the woods, ending with a cocktail and a meal from a hole in the wall restaurant I cannot believe is not famous yet.

We have a four-year-old. We have a rescue German Shepherd mix. We live in Germany and spend a suspicious amount of time trying to find places we can drive to that work for all four of us. Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy. We have covered some ground.

We want to move. We want nature. We want to come home feeling better and stronger than when we left. Not just rested from sitting next to a pool watching our son ask for snacks every eight minutes.

We have not found it yet. Not in a hotel, anyway. We came close once.

A small Airbnb about an hour or two north of Stockholm. Built by hand by the owner and his family. On an island. An A-frame house, glass and wood, sitting on top of a rock. One side facing dense forest. The other looking down through the trees onto a large ocean inlet.

There was an outdoor CrossFit gym. Just for us. A walking trail around the island. Quiet in the way that only an island with almost nobody on it can be quiet. I told my husband on night one, I would love to retire here.

That was the closest we have gotten. It was not a hotel. It was one family’s home that happened to be everything we were looking for.

That is the gap.

I talked about this with Lali Jochmann on Hospitality Folks and it stopped me mid-conversation. Because he named exactly what is missing and why hotels keep missing it.

Who Lali is

Lali is a Swiss national. He spent years as a competitive swimmer representing Switzerland, then went on to build and run fitness operations in Singapore for over a decade. He has owned and directed multiple performance and wellness businesses, holds an MBA from Zurich Elite Business School, and has spent 15 years working with high-achieving clients on the relationship between physical strength, mental clarity, and long-term performance. He is one of the most grounded people I have spoken to about what wellness in hospitality could actually look like, versus what it usually looks like.

Which brings us to the basement gym.

The basement gym problem

Lali described it perfectly. You check into a property. You ask about fitness. Someone points you toward the lower level. You get in the elevator, go down, and find a room with secondhand treadmills, bad lighting, and equipment that is clearly an afterthought. Somebody in some department realized they had a spare room and decided that counted as a wellness offering.

He called it exactly what it is: a disservice to your guests.

Here is what he is proposing instead. Imagine waking up in the Swiss Alps. Snow on the hills. You go out and train before breakfast. Real equipment, real space, designed for it. You eat a meal that was built around how you just moved your body. You take your kids outside. You hike. You come back for an afternoon session. You finish the day with yoga or an ice bath or both. You sleep well. You do it again.

That is not a niche product. That is what a growing portion of travelers are actively looking for and cannot find in a hotel.

Why families are the missed market

Most wellness hospitality talks about couples or solo travelers. The family angle gets treated as an afterthought, the same way fitness does.

But Lali’s point was simple. An active, nature-connected experience is not harder with children. It is better. Kids move. They want to be outside. They want to participate. A hotel that builds programming around that is not just serving the parents. It is giving families a shared experience that a pool and a kids’ club cannot replicate.

He said: tell me something better than training together. He was talking about couples, but the same logic applies to families. If you share an activity, you share the experience. That is what people come back for.

Research backs the business case too. The effects of a passive holiday, the sit-by-the-pool kind, are typically gone within two or three days of returning to work. A transformative experience, one where a guest comes home stronger, more rested in a real way, with a kid who slept better because they actually ran around in the mountains, that is a different story. That guest comes back. That guest tells people.

The market is already there

Global alcohol consumption is down roughly 20 percent. Gym membership penetration across the EU sits somewhere around 15 to 20 percent of the population. That is 80 to 100 million people who are already oriented toward an active lifestyle and traveling with the same expectations they have at home.

Lali watched a coffee shop in Slovakia outperform every bar on the street on a Friday night. A reading, then a DJ, nobody drunk, everybody fully present. He sees the same shift coming for hospitality. The travelers who want that experience exist (this author included – bring me a day time kid friendly rave in a bakery with a good coffee pleeaaassseee). The infrastructure for them mostly does not.

Switzerland, he argues, is in a better position than anywhere to build it. The nature is already there. The reputation for precision and quality is already there. What is missing is a hotel operator willing to build the whole experience around movement, longevity, family connection, and real wellness, not a spa menu and a treadmill in the basement.

What Lali is doing next

After more than a decade in Singapore, Lali is ready to bring this vision back to Europe. He is looking for the right senior leadership role in wellness hospitality in the DACH region, specifically with operators who are serious about building something that does not exist yet.

If that is you, or if you know someone building it, he is worth the conversation.

Find him on LinkedIn at Lali Jochmann or on Instagram at liftwithlali. The full episode is on Hospitality Folks on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.

If you run a property or are building one: is family wellness hospitality on your roadmap? What is stopping it?

Follow me, Alicia Dick Wahlberg , for the hospitality and workforce conversations that hotel operators and founders are actually having behind closed doors.