What 46 of the World’s 50 Best Hotels Share: Technogym and a New Wellness Standard
When The World’s 50 Best Hotels 2026 were unveiled in Paris, one detail cut through: Technogym equips the wellness areas of 46 of the 50 winning hotels, and every one of the top 20. More than a statistic, it signals a shift in what defines a great hotel. Wellness has become a core part of the guest experience, on par with the room and the restaurant.
A Ranking That Revealed a Pattern
On the evening of September 15, Paris hosted the unveiling of The World’s 50 Best Hotels 2026. The annual ranking is produced by 50 Best, the organization behind some of hospitality’s most respected accolades, created by the UK media company William Reed, and voted on by an Academy of more than 800 hoteliers, travel journalists, and industry experts.
Beneath the rankings sat a telling pattern. Technogym, the Italian wellness company, equips the wellness areas of 46 of the 50 winning hotels, 92% of the list, and is present across 88% of the full top 100. In the top 20, the presence is total: every one of the world’s 20 best hotels relies on Technogym.
The standout examples make the point concrete. Rosewood Hong Kong claims the number one spot this year with a wall-to-wall Technogym wellness center, and Italy’s Passalacqua on Lake Como, the first European venue on the list, comes in at number five. A pattern that complete is not a coincidence. It points to something the best properties in the world have understood ahead of everyone else.
Wellness Became a Defining Standard, Not a Side Amenity
The 50 Best properties this year share a common thread, and it is the real story. Wellness is no longer a side amenity tucked down a corridor. It has become a defining part of the guest experience, weighted alongside room quality and dining when guests, and expert voters, decide what makes a hotel exceptional.
That is a meaningful shift for any luxury operator to absorb. Travelers now expect the wellness experience to match the luxury of everything else around them. The modern luxury guest keeps a wellness routine at home and expects to maintain it on the road, to the same standard, with the same quality of equipment and surroundings. When 92% of the world’s best hotels invest in wellness at this level, it stops being a differentiator at the top of the market and becomes a baseline expectation.
Where the Standard Is Heading
What the winners also reveal is where the bar is moving next. A growing number of this year’s properties have chosen Sand Stone, Technogym’s new design identity built around the idea of wellness as a genuine part of a luxury interior rather than a utilitarian room apart from it.
The experience is also becoming more personal and more connected. Many properties now open the guest’s wellness journey with Technogym Checkup, an AI-driven assessment station that measures body composition, cardio fitness, strength, mobility, and flexibility in minutes, then build a tailored experience from there. Increasingly that journey extends beyond the gym and into the room itself, through in-room wellness solutions. The direction is clear: wellness is being designed as a complete guest journey, not confined to a single space with set hours.
What This Means for Luxury Properties
The takeaway from the 50 Best list is not about any single brand of equipment. It is about what the best hotels in the world are signaling to the rest of the industry.
Wellness has earned its place among the core pillars of luxury hospitality, next to the room, the service, and the table. The properties recognized as the world’s finest have already made that shift, treating the wellness experience as central to their identity and designing it with the same intention they bring to everything else. For any operator thinking about where luxury is heading, the message in the data is hard to miss: wellness is no longer where a property can afford to come second.
Technogym is a Premier Partner of the International Luxury Hotel Association. For more information, visit technogym.com.
