Village Hotels launches Subs Bench through CoverMe to build stronger pipeline of group exercise talent

From finding cover to building stronger fitness teams: Village Hotels used CoverMe to transform instructor recruitment – more than 200 applications to 10 clubs in less than one month.

Village Hotels has been using CoverMe across its 34-site estate for the past year to make managing group exercise cover easier, faster and more compliant. Now, what began as a solution for last-minute cover has developed into something much bigger.

Working with the CoverMe team, Village Hotels has become the first operator to launch a Subs Bench, a pool of pre-vetted, qualified and insured instructors that clubs can call on.

Diana Wright, Brand Group Fitness Manager for Village Hotels, says the development tackles one of the biggest challenges facing group exercise operators: finding high-quality instructors for the classes they want to offer, rather than shaping the timetable around the instructors they already have.

“The partnership with CoverMe has created a whole new recruitment pipeline, giving us access to instructors we may never otherwise have found. Some of these will now go on to secure permanent places on our club timetables,” she says.

Building top-tier timetables
Before CoverMe, recruiting instructors was time-consuming and unpredictable. Like many operators, club managers relied on word of mouth, social media, personal networks and members who showed an interest in retraining to become teachers.

Developed in partnership with Village Hotels, the CoverMe Subs Bench was piloted in 10 clubs with the greatest need. Each site identified their hardest-to-find instructor types and these were reviewed against the timetables and Village Hotel’s wider gold standard ambitions, creating a clear recruitment brief for CoverMe.

More than 230 applications were received from fitness professionals in under 30 days. Club managers then selected over half of these (56%) to join the bench, giving them a far wider pool of qualified talent to draw on.

Cover is offered first to a club’s regular instructors before going to the Subs Bench. But the potential goes far beyond emergency cover. The wider value is recruitment, as instructors who prove a good fit can move from providing cover to filling permanent timetable slots.

“CoverMe is helping us discover talented instructors and is particularly valuable in specialist areas like Reformer Pilates,” says Wright. “Rather than accepting we can’t offer a class because we can’t find the right instructor, we can now proactively search for the talent we need.

“Working with CoverMe, our aim is to design the best possible timetable for each club based on its members and demand, and then find the best instructors to deliver it. The impact was clear when we opened the Reading club. For the first time, we could build the timetable we actually wanted and recruit specifically into those slots.”

By identifying gaps and recruiting for them directly, Village Hotels has reduced its reliance on a small pool of instructors and slashed its risk of cancelled classes. It also gives the brand confidence as it opens new locations, letting clubs establish a compliance baseline for instructors from day one.

Raising the compliance bar
Overseeing 34 clubs from Eastleigh to Aberdeen, for Wright one aspect of CoverMe has been particularly valuable: “For me, it’s a compliance tool. Ensuring every instructor is appropriately qualified and insured is a major responsibility. Previously that relied heavily on individual clubs, but with CoverMe, every instructor’s qualifications and insurance are verified by a human before they’re available on the platform. It’s a safer, more robust way to manage the instructor workforce and means clubs can focus on delivering great group exercise experiences rather than constantly worrying about the admin associated with checking and managing instructor documentation.”

Shaping the future of CoverMe
Following the success of the pilot, Village Hotels is rolling the Subs Bench out to the rest of the estate.

“The concept was developed around the challenges identified by the Village Hotels team, but the functionality is available to all CoverMe operators,” says Lou Crossland, Chief Commercial Officer for CoverMe. “It’s not simply about sending out a request when someone calls in sick. Operators can widen their access to qualified instructors, improve the quality and consistency of cover and proactively build a recruitment pipeline around the needs of individual clubs, while we manage all the compliance on their behalf.”