How to Increase Uptake and Utilisation for Hotel Academies and Sports
Running academies bring families back year after year - if the hotel promotes them right and manages them well.
An academy is not just "an activity." It's something a guest can come back to - same sport, same age group, same time every day, run by the same coach for the whole season. A lot of hotels have activities. Fewer have real academies - tennis, swimming, football, run properly, week after week.
Done well, it becomes one of the clearest reasons a hotel stands out. Done badly, it's just the busiest, least organized corner of the property.
Why academies are worth running
A kid who does the same tennis academy every summer wants to do it again next year, at the same hotel. It also sets a hotel apart - any hotel can have a pool, not every hotel can run ten different academies through the season. Some academies are free and included in the stay, others are paid sessions on top of the room - either way, they give guests a real reason to choose one hotel over another, and to come back to it.
What makes academies hard to manage
Academies run on a schedule with limited capacity - a tennis court can hold up to 4 people, a pool may fit no more than 8 kids at a time. Someone always needs to track that capacity in real time, not count who actually showed up.
A few things make this harder in practice:
- Per-session capacity comes up constantly. These are staffed activities, and if nobody's tracking it in real time, the same spot ends up promised to two different guests.
- Most academies only run part of the year, so seasonality shifts the whole schedule month to month instead of keeping it fixed.
- Not every academy is run by the same people. Some are in-house programming, staffed directly by the hotel, like a kids' club - others come through outside partners running their own coaches on hotel grounds. The guest doesn't know or care which is which; they just want to book it the same way.
- A parent asks at the desk if there's a swim slot free tomorrow at 10am. If nobody can answer that without calling around, the hotel's already lost a bit of trust - no visibility at the desk is maybe the most common gap of all.
How to promote academies and get more guests to use them
Most of it comes down to timing and visibility, not the programme itself:
- Tell guests before they arrive, not after check-in. A pre-arrival email or a QR code in the room means a parent already knows the academy exists before they've even unpacked.
- Make it as easy to book as a hotel room, not a sign-up sheet on a door at the kids' club.
- Look at which academies actually fill up and which ones don't. If the swim academy is full every week and the padel one is empty, that's worth knowing before next season starts.
If it's hard to book, guests won't wait and ask again - they'll book something else. A parent who can't get a straight answer about tomorrow's tennis slot will find a local operator who can, and book there instead.
What a hotel needs to manage academies properly
None of the challenges above goes away without the right system behind them:
- One place to see in-house and partner-run academies together, not two separate systems.
- Live capacity per session, for every academy, updated in real time.
- The same easy booking flow for a kids' swim class and an adult tennis lesson.
What this looks like in practice
Falkensteiner Resort Punta Skala runs a wide range of academies through the season - tennis, padel, swimming, football and more, some in-house, others through partners like Sunball Tennis Academy.
Both the in-house and partner-run side face the same underlying question: how does a hotel keep availability, staffing and bookings straight across ten programmes running on different schedules, some managed by the hotel and some by outside coaches? At Punta Skala, both the kids' swimming academy and adult tennis are bookable through the same system, with live capacity per session - whether the guest booking it is four years old or forty.
Academies aren't a side activity anymore. For a lot of families, they're the reason the trip got booked in the first place - worth running like it.