Can a Business Trip Make You Healthier?

By Rieva Lesonsky

Are you a frequent business traveler (like I am)? If you’re also health-conscious (and what small business owner can afford not to be?) you’ll be happy to learn that today’s hotels are paying attention to business travelers’ needs and becoming healthier places to stay. Going beyond the now-standard in-hotel gym or offering oatmeal at breakfast, here are seven ways hotels are getting healthier as reported by MarketWatch.

1. Group wellness: If you’re holding an offsite meeting for your team or an annual conference at a hotel, you can now take advantage of healthy options like light meals and exercise breaks during the event. (Forget the rubber chicken!) At some Hyatt resort properties, for instance, meeting groups can enjoy wellness activities like chair yoga or 15-minute neck massages during sessions.
2. Breathing easy: Smoking rooms are fewer and far between (about 10 percent of all hotel rooms), which is good news for those of us bothered by smoke. But if it’s really crowded, you might get stuck in a smokers’ room anyway. To avoid that, visit FreshStay.com, which lists more than 5,000 hotels that are totally smoke-free.
3. Get PURE: If a nonsmoking room’s not enough, go one step beyond nonsmoking with PURE rooms, designed for guests with allergies or asthma. These rooms use air purifiers, hypoallergenic mattress covers, and special cleaning treatments to ensure there are no allergens; they are offered by about 250 hotels in North America.
4. It’s organic: Remember the days when a club sandwich was about as healthy as room service got? No more. A growing number of hotels are adding locally sourced and/or organic food to their room service and restaurant menus.
5. In-room fitness: If you’ve ever tried to motivate yourself to get dressed in workout gear and head 30 flights down to the hotel gym at 5:30 in the morning, you’ll appreciate this increasingly popular amenity that lets you roll out of bed and work out in privacy. MarketWatch cites a 2010 American Hotel & Lodging Association survey that found about 21 percent of luxury hotels, 17 percent of upscale hotels, 15 percent of midprice hotels, 7 percent of economy and 4 percent of budget hotels have in-room exercise equipment. Hilton Garden Inns and Omni Hotels Resort are two that provide in-room fitness kits; many hotels also have on-demand exercise shows for viewing on the room TV.
6. Get smart: Concierges have long provided guests with suggested running routes, etc., to work out on the road. Now you can forget trying to remember directions or carrying a paper map on your run. Concierge suggestions are going digital with smartphone apps that let travelers find routes or calculate their distance.
7. Professional help: Some locations (often resorts) have personal trainers, nutritionists and wellness coaches on staff. Got some extra time between meetings? Book a session and instead of going back to your business feeling flabby, you can be better than ever.

Who knew going on a business trip could actually improve your health? These days, it just might.

Image by Flickr user Jennifer Woodard Maderazo (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 26th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Entrepreneurs, Health and Wellness, Small Business, small business, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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