The Hospitality sector has grown a long way since it’s Infancy, the industry predominantly consist of Food & Beverage, Travel & Tourism, Recreation and Lodging (Essays, UK.November, 2018). The focus of the paper would be towards recreation which can be defined as the pursuit of leisure activities during one’s spare time (Tribe, 2011) and can include vastly different activities such as golfing, sport fishing, rock climbing, Functional training, Dance fitness and various sports. The recent growth within recreation has been immense with a lot of brands creating supporting technology to enhance the customers experience, the best of hotels and resort operators understand that the fine line between a commercial health club and a hospitality based fitness club is very thin. Due to the various demands of the customers many high end hotel brands have started becoming sensitive towards the fitness requirements of their guests and are actually going to the extent of making state of the art Gymnasium’s availible within the property.
There are also a few common challenges that are faced by hotels such as space allocation and supervised enviornments but the disruption of technology within the recreational field has helped in eradicating some of these problems. There is a huge potential which has been identified for hotels and resorts to incorporate experiences that consist of trends that fuel the fitness Industry. The factors that have played a big role in the growth of recreation are Functional Training & Technology. Functional training in modern gyms are defined as movements that mainly involve weight exercises and target to strengthen the activities of our daily life, it is elementary that any fitness club incorporate this within their amenities. The second aspect is technology, it is evident that disruption of technology has played a major role in any emerging sector and recreation is no exception. As mentioned earlier one of the common problems that are faced by the recreation sector are supervised enviorments which is quite costly and requires an abundance of manpower. Technological advancements within the industry has actually helped in bringing down cost associated with expert level guidance and motivation towards gym members, hotel guests and recreational enthusiasts. Together both of these factors have changed the way Recreation is perceived by the population, these factors have helped conceptualize socially driven exercise, virtual guided training sessions as well as technology which helps monitor various health based parameters.
Amidst all the technological advances the fitness wearable technology is notably the most commonly used amongst people. It comes across as having a lot of benefits and is one of the most affordable technology when it comes to fitness assistance. The use of smartphones and Fitness Wearable Technology has helped people keep track of their physical activities and various health related scales such as Heart rate, Calories burned and time elapsed since their last physical activity. Fitness wearable technology has a variety of products such as Fitbits, Fitness Trackers and Smartwatches. These devices help their user track their progress by connecting to various health based applications, these health based applications further help their users to establish their goals. It has become an exciting area of Innovation and has received sufficient attention over the past few years, but a reality check is necessary regarding the user acceptability ( Subramanian 2014)
The Fitness wearable Industry is evaluated to grow from $15.74bn in 2015 to $51.60bn by 2022, it has seen a growth of 15.51 percent annually in between 2016 and 2022 (Markets and Markets, 2017). Yearly shipments of wearable gadgets are anticipated to surpass 500 million units by 2020, and more than 33% of the populace is present in developed markets, such as North America and some Western European nations, (Gartner, 2015). Hence, due to the growth in Fitness Wearable more cell phone based brands have entered the wearables market to establish their dominance. This has helped create a highly competitive and disruptive market. The Fitness wearables have come a long way since its Infancy and get reworked thoroughly through every passing generation. In basic words wearable gadgets are characterized as ‘wearable PCs that are worn like dresses and individual enhancements to show data for users Intelligently and productively, for example, wearable glasses and wearable watches’ (Liu and Guo, 2017, p. 43). Wearable gadgets can be separated into two classes as per their usefulness: 1) notifiers that give data about your general surroundings, for example, savvy watches and Trackers which utilise sensors to record information (Lunney et al., 2016). 2) Sports wearables, which fall into the second class, Sports wearables have functionalities and related applications that offer the ease of preparing Fitness plans, help with wellness and Activity based data, gather and process wellness related information, which gives input to users about their progress (Gee et al., 2015; Lee et al., 2016; Swan, 2012). These may enable users to remain fit, get dynamic, and enhance their personal satisfaction.
In any case, it must be noticed that the acceptance of wearables is still in its Infancy, and more than 30 percent of users surrender their wearables after the gadgets lose their feeling of novelty (Gartner, 2016). This example of utilization implies that organizations can’t get enough information from users to build their items (Ledger, 2014). But, more recent studies show that Fitness Wearable Technology represent around 50 percent of consumer acceptance and purchase in the wearable Technology sector, and the quantity of sales is anticipated to develop from 61 million units in 2016 to 187 million units in 2020 (CCS Insight, 2016). With the Fitness Wearable Industry showing so much potential in terms of growth, every brand wants to step into the market with a unique product.
The technological enhancement of these devices throughout its various generations has been quite disruptive and Competitive as well. But, with any new product or innovation in the market it only makes sense to study how the various established generations of consumers are ready to accept the technology, to study the consumer acceptance the project uses the model of the Unified theory of acceptance and Use of technology (UTAUT2) (Venkatesh et al. 2012), this model was used to understand the factors which would play a major role in the adoption of the Fitness wearable technology. The model proposes concepts such as Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, Social Influence, Facilitating Conditions and Hedonic Motivation.
