As our sector emerges as one the biggest areas of consumer expenditure, it’s exciting to see strong growth in demand. Now we need to increase supply to ensure quality of experience

We’re in the thick of a historic shift in the sector, as we move from being supply-driven to being demand-driven.

Balancing supply and demand has always been a challenge in this market. Throughout the 80s and 90s, when the first big waves of construction build-out occurred, the sector was very volatile.

Spates of overbuilding during this period undermined investor confidence, but were a classic characteristic of an emerging industry.

Today we’re in a different world, with fitness, health and wellness one of the biggest areas of consumer expenditure, demand beginning to outstrip supply and the need to create more capacity at every price point.

Operators are reporting that visitation is up since the pandemic, with more visits per member and growing membership levels creating a squeeze on space, especially at peak times.

The impact of some aggregators and keenly-priced insurance company deals are further driving up volumes.

Also contributing to the challenge is the move towards wellness, which is seeing more consumers being mindful of sleep patterns, gut health and circadian rhythms, meaning there’s greater awareness of the optimum times to exercise and resultant pressures on capacity.

Some operators are telling us extreme peak periods are undermining the customer experience, with queues for equipment and a general feeling of overwhelm that some members find offputting.

Consumers driving growth to this degree is a dynamic we haven’t been used to historically, but it’s a great problem to have. The most oversubscribed operators will accelerate rollouts, while looking for ways to reduce pressure at peak times and new approaches to sweating their existing assets.

The hospitality industry is ahead of us on this and practised at optimising every inch of real estate by doing things such as moving offices and back of house functions off-site to free up floor space for customer-facing functions. I even went to a restaurant once that stored all its food off-site and had a refrigerated van ferrying ingredients from chilled storage throughout the day to free up more space for tables.

The bigger picture for our sector is that demand is going to keep growing, putting pressure on facilities and we need a battery of solutions to deal with this, including growth, pricing reviews and facility optimisation, with the aim of ensuring the customer experience remains an excellent one.