Why membership out-earns lodging at Gravity Haus hotels

Ask most hotel owners to rank their margins and you’ll see a familiar pattern. Rooms at the top, food and beverage at the bottom, everything else somewhere in between. Jim Deters has added a line above both. 

Jim is the founder and CEO of Gravity Haus, an adventure lifestyle hotel and membership club with 13 properties across the west of Canada and the United States. He arrived in hospitality after two decades building software and community businesses and opened his first hotel in 2019. Speaking on Matt Talks Hospitality, he was direct about where the money sits for Gravity Haus. 

"Membership sits above lodging in terms of its profitability," he says. "It's very high margin and a very positive economic driver." Here’s how he made it happen. 

The recurring revenue nobody else owns 

Roughly 700 local members pay into Gravity Haus' Vail property alone. Not points holders – locals who treat the building as their office, their coffee shop and their gym, on a monthly subscription. 

For a high-barrier resort market, that changes the shape of the year. Every mountain asset has a peak and a trough. A membership base that pays through the shoulder months flattens the curve, and it does so at a margin above rooms. 

Then there is the second cohort. Members in Denver, Texas, Florida and New York buy in too, and for them the subscription works as paid loyalty. Gravity Haus pushes what it calls rope drops through its app: alerts that match a rate to a weather window and let a member book on the spot. That is a direct distribution channel sitting on top of a revenue line, which few independent groups own outright. 

It proved its worth during what Jim called Colorado's worst snow season ever. Season pass holders are mobile, and Gravity Haus had just opened in Revelstoke, British Columbia, where the snow was good. Colorado members flew north to a property they already belonged to. 

The asset has to earn it 

Membership revenue is not free. It’s bought with square footage. The Vail property carries 18,000 square feet of amenity space: a co-working lounge, private meeting booths, a functional fitness gym with turf and squat racks, steam rooms, saunas and cold plunges, plus yoga and HIIT classes run by in-house trainers. 

For anyone underwriting a deal, the question is: is the amenity spend worth it against the subscription revenue and the seasonality it removes? Jim is candid that the answer is usually no. "We look at dozens of opportunities before you get to say yes to one," he says. The filter always includes whether the property can carry the full wellness stack and still work for the owner. 

Two systems, one member 

The model runs on two profiles. Membership lives in custom software Gravity Haus built on HubSpot, because nothing off the shelf gave the program the flexibility it needed. The property runs on Mews. 

"If you don't get the PMS right and you don't get that core operating system as a partner [like] with Mews, a lot of things are going to go wrong," Jim says. 

The point of the technology is that the member never sees it. "Our consumers don't care about how cool our tech stack is," he adds. What they want is to be recognized, and to have their needs anticipated rather than met. Someone who knows the dog's name and that the bike came along this trip. 

Hiring the fifty-one percenter 

Front desk staff are called house experience specialists. It’s a rebrand of the receptionist, except that Jim argues the job changed first. Swiping cards and checking ID is a transaction, and a well-run system should make it nearly invisible. 

"I can teach Ryan how to use Mews. That's not hard," he says. "Can I teach him to be warm and smile? I guess so. Authentically, it's a little harder." 

Ryan is a real person on the desk in Vail, and he gets named in guest reviews. Repeatedly. Jim cites Danny Meyer's Setting the Table and the idea of hiring the fifty-one percenter: recruit for attitude, train the skills. Gravity Haus hires from the communities it operates in, which is also how each property stays locally specific across 13 sites. 

Where culture turns into distribution 

When guests name staff, trails and rides in reviews, it produces exactly the detail that large language models now surface to travelers. Increasingly, that’s a big deal for a property’s visibility. 

"More and more people are looking for what to do, not necessarily the destination first," Jim explains. The query is no longer "hotels in Utah". It is closer to: "Where is the best place to mountain bike this time of year in the western United States for an intermediate rider." 

A hotel with guest-validated evidence of what it sits next to has an advantage in that search. And it converts on arrival, because the ancillary revenue is built from experiences rather than the usual menu. "Ours are so high because we're selling experiences," Jim says. "We're not just selling an early check-in or a late checkout." 

His advice to owners without a mountain outside is not to copy the model. It’s to audit what is genuinely local and partner with it: the yoga studio next door, an acupuncturist, a birdwatching guide. Those niches are searchable now, and people will pay to be taken to them. 

None of this makes the rooms unimportant. Jim is quick to say you still have to check people in and run restaurants. But the ranking on his margins suggests the box with the bed was never the product. 

"We're just the enabler of that experience," he says. The margin follows from there. 

Matt Talks Hospitality is a hospitality podcast for curious and innovative hoteliers. Watch or listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. 

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