IHRSA Term Paper

Globalisation:

According to Udayasankar, H. (2014), Globalisation refers to the shift towards a more integrated and shared world economy. The health and fitness industry exemplifies globalisation, because many ideas and resources are shared across international borders between thousands of health clubs and their owners (IHRSA 2016). IHRSA is a non-profit organisation that gathers important information from thousands of health clubs and millions of members across the globe to share key findings and relevant data with other health club operators, this shared data assists health clubs in attracting and retaining their club members (IHRSA 2016).

In today’s health and fitness market economy, many larger organisations do business in multiple developed

These decisions or recommendations have been tried in many other health clubs such as Curves across the globe and are proven to be successful, thus increasing the health clubs retention rate and the level of professionalism within the health and fitness

The remaining 60% of health clubs and 69% of health club members is shared between the 45 other countries across the globe.

In the USA the health and fitness industry still focuses on physical conditioning without connecting to the wellness side of health and fitness. The majority of health clubs in the USA are specifically designed to be health clubs whereas in Europe health clubs can be defined as multi facilities providing members with multiple options such as tennis, gymnasium, pool, spa area’s and so on. The majority health clubs in Europe are focused on wellness and health as opposed to just physically conditioning.

Understanding that these cultures are different and the level of expectation from members will differ within each country, operators need to managing their health clubs specifically for their clientele an example is the health club from where I operator is designed to cater for large numbers of members. Working in an environment that has over 16,000 members in one health club provides us with many opportunities to work with different cultures and the systems and services provided are to find a balance between these cultures and increase members