How Hospitality Can Create the New Social Scene Around Women’s Sports
Women’s sports are no longer a niche category, they’re driving the biggest cultural and travel shift of the decade. From sweat jetting and active escapes to marathons that boost city tourism by over 300%, sport has become a lifestyle identity. Yet, while beauty brands have entered the space confidently, hospitality still lags. Here’s how hotels, travel brands, and lifestyle companies can reimagine the social experience around sport and claim the next big opportunity
The Rise of Active Travel and Sweat Jetting
TripAdvisor named sweat-jetting as one of the key travel trends of 2026. Travellers are no longer booking trips and then figuring out what to do. They are building entire trips around physical experiences: mara-cations, race-cations, ultra-marathons through Patagonia, cycling routes through Marrakech. The Chicago Marathon alone drove a 300% spike in city visitors. The Boston and Berlin marathons, up 228% and 222% respectively. Active travel has shifted, as the report put it, "from hobby to identity."
All of this is happening at the same time as women's sport reaches an indisputable inflexion point:
Aggregate viewing time across the WNBA, NCAA women's basketball and the NWSL hit 370 million viewer-hours in 2024, up 430% from 2021.
The Women's Rugby World Cup final was the most-watched rugby match of the year.
The 2025 UEFA Women's Euros broke national broadcast records in multiple countries.
The Watch-Play Gap: What Brands Are Missing
The narrative around women's sport has focused almost entirely on viewership: who's watching, how many, which platforms, which demographics. But there's a more interesting story in the gap between the sports women are watching and the sports they're actually practising.
The most-watched women's sports are team sports: basketball, soccer, and rugby. But the sports with the fastest-growing female participation are individual and often outdoor: running, weight training, cycling, and padel. Padel alone now has 35 million global players and has grown its club network by 22% in a single year.
Why does this matter? Because a woman who runs and also watches the WNBA cares about recovery, about what she wears, about how sport fits into her identity. She follows athletes on Instagram because of who they are, not just what they do. She is, in short, much more interesting to market to than a generic "sports fan".
Beauty Brands Got It Right Before Hospitality
The beauty industry figured out early that the connection between their customer and the female sports fan wasn't a demographic coincidence. Both spaces are about self-expression, identity, and the performance of confidence. A woman who does her skin prep before a match isn't mixing two worlds. She's living an integrated one.
Glossier was first, partnering with the WNBA as its inaugural beauty partner in 2020, before women's sport was the conversation it is now. That bet has aged extraordinarily well, due to Glossier’s cultural fluency
Since then, more brands have stepped on the scene, and my current favourite one aligns perfectly with my niche crossover between beauty and hospitality:
Elemis × Aston Martin Aramco F1: 41% of F1 fans are now women. Elemis read the data, then went further than most by launching a spa experience on the Aston Martin yacht at Monaco during race weekend. Sport, travel, luxury wellness, and brand all occupy the same moment. That kind of experience layering is rare, and it's exactly the direction the space is heading.
Why I like this so much? They didn’t treat sport as a media channel. They built something inside the culture beyond the classic "reach female sports fans" brief. They asked the golden question: what does this woman actually need, and what is our brand genuinely positioned to give her?
Where Hotels Can Win the Sports Experience
Here's the tension I keep coming back to. Beauty brands have found the language for women's sport, even if execution is still uneven. Hospitality hasn't.
The standard hotel sports package is still built around a very particular idea of a fan: someone who wants a room, a big screen in the bar, and ideally a ticket. That experience was designed around men's sport, around group travel, around the assumption that the sporting event is the whole point and everything else is logistical.
But the sweat jetter, the woman travelling to the Women's Euros, the WNBA Finals weekend, the padel tournament she's also competing in is not looking for logistics. She's looking for an experience that understands who she is. She got to the hotel via a group chat, a Substack she reads religiously, or a community she's part of online. The match is the anchor, but the weekend is the thing. And right now, hotels are largely missing the weekend.
"Sports fandom is driving +25% growth in stadium tours and experiences bookings year-over-year."
— Tripadvisor Trendcast 2026
Designing for the Modern Fan
The opportunity, as I see it, is for a hotel to do what Sephora did with the glam room: build something inside the culture, not just adjacent to it. The tools are already there; it's a matter of assembling them.
What could building the ecosystem look like:
The match add-on
She's booked because there's a game. So the hotel makes that explicit and builds around it. A pre-game ritual package (not a prosecco brunch), but something that actually means something to this guest: a curated beauty edit in the room from a brand that sponsors the league and a complementary creative NA cocktail upon arrival at the bar. The match as the occasion, the hotel is the space where she gets ready for it.
The in-property watch experience
She came for the weekend. There are three other games happening across two days that she wants to watch — games she can't get tickets to and the hotel makes that possible on property: a curated screening space, not a generic bar with the game on in the background, but something designed and considered. A reason to stay inside the ecosystem rather than disappear into a pub. More time in the hotel, more relationship with the brand, more spending, and a guest who feels designed for. Likelihood to have a higher brand loyalty, recommend it to her group of friends.
The recovery offering
She ran a 10K that morning, and she has tickets to the evening session. What does she need in between? A hotel that answers that question with a sports recovery treatment, a recovery-focused room menu and an amenities partnership with a brand like Clinique Sport or Elemis. Clinique already partners with the England Red Roses, so the pipeline is there.
The gorpcore Gorpgirl weekend
A property like The Standard Ibiza already sits at the intersection of lifestyle, culture, and physical energy. A sweat-jetting package built around outdoor female athleticism: trail running in the morning with a local guide, beauty-and-recovery in the afternoon with a brand that has sport credentials, a female athlete or cultural figure for an evening conversation. I believe this is far from a stretch; it's the logical next iteration of what that brand is already doing.
The woman who books this is not niche. She's the most desirable guest in travel right now.
So what's my brief?
Women's sport is a cultural infrastructure: a set of communities, rituals, identities, and occasions that are becoming more significant, not less, in how a particular and very valuable cohort of women organises her life, her travel, and her spending.
The hospitality brands that will matter in this space will succeed with this category disruption, just like Glossier, by designing multiple experiences around who the fan actually is.
The 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup in Brazil, the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles and the continued WNBA expansion are major moments coming that will pull new audiences and new money into this conversation. The window to establish something genuine is now.
Because the thing about sweat jetting is: it's not just a travel trend. It's a signal about how women want to live with their physical, cultural, and social lives woven together rather than siloed.
Hi, I'm Mel! I work with brands at the intersection of culture, experience, and strategy, helping them untangle what's shifting and building the thinking that turns that into action. If you're sitting with a question about where your brand sits in a shift like this, I'd love to think it through with you! Let's talk on a 1:1 call!
