Tech
S’poreans are flying around the world to race each other and bizs are cashing in
From airline deals to hotel discounts, businesses are profiting from fitness races all over the world
There’s a new reason Singaporeans are booking flights, and it’s not for the beach or a bowl of ramen. It’s a start line.
In Aug 2026, more than 20,000 athletes, including those from Singapore, turned up in Bangkok for what organisers called the biggest HYROX race in Asia’s history. It was four days of runs and workouts that test endurance at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre, up from three days and roughly 17,500 racers just months earlier in Mar.
Singapore had already had its own version of that moment just in Apr, with the National Stadium being taken over for three days by more than 14,000 athletes from 58 countries lining up at the start tunnel. And HYROX is returning to Singapore for the second time of the year later in Nov.
These aren’t isolated moments, but the visible rise of a travel category: the “race-cation.” Fitness enthusiasts aren’t just picking a gym or a training plan anymore; they’re picking a destination, buying flights, booking hotels, and building entire holidays backwards from a finish line.
And the businesses that spotted it early—airlines, hotel chains, even government tourism boards—are already building entire products and services around it.
The businesses that got there first
A handful of brands were quick to build entire commercial products around the race-cation the moment they saw it coming.
In Jan 2026, Air Asia became HYROX’s Official Regional Airline Partner for Asia-Pacific, offering registered HYROX participants a 10% flight discount during a designated booking window, covering focus markets that include Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Osaka and Incheon. The partnership targets reaching more than 250,000 athletes across over 15 cities in the region over the year.
The airline also unveiled a co-branded aircraft livery themed “Keep Moving, Keep Rising”, signed on as title partner for HYROX’s debut events in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, and is partnering directly with local HYROX Training Club gyms, meaning the training studios feeding people into these races are part of its larger commercial ecosystem.
Then, Hyatt went further into the actual stay. World of Hyatt announced its role as HYROX’s Official Regional Hotel Partner across Asia-Pacific in Oct 2025, and offers HYROX racers and spectators an extra 10% off its member rate, 15% off spa and dining, and in-room recovery touches like an ice bucket on request at properties in race cities.
Even payment companies have carved a slice of the pie for themselves too.
HYROX Singapore ticket buyers can get up to 10% off through GrabPay’s PayLater option, and AIA has sponsored the Singapore event as title partner, bundling in complimentary personal accident coverage for registered athletes.
These intentionally built products have found a big customer base designed around a specific new kind of trip, one where the itinerary is built backwards from a start line.
The fitness trend that started it all
If there’s one name behind this shift, it’s HYROX. The fitness race—eight 1km runs, each followed by a functional workout station—started in Hamburg in 2017 with 650 participating athletes.
Less than a decade later, that number has grown exponentially. HYROX projects around 1.5 million participants and roughly US$270 million (S$343.7 million) in revenue in 2026, spread across 121 events in 34 countries—a business built almost entirely on entry fees, gym-affiliate licensing and sponsorship, with close to zero spent on paid marketing.
Asia-Pacific has become one of HYROX’s fastest-growing regions.
HYROX has staged races in 10 Asia-Pacific cities so far, drawing more than 196,000 participants, with newer markets like Osaka, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Incheon named as key growth cities for the year ahead.
But why does a fitness race translate into travel so easily?
The real appeal is that HYROX runs the exact same eight-station format in every city.
So a Singaporean who trains for it at home can fly to Seoul or Bangkok and compete in something functionally identical, just with a new stadium, a new crowd and a fresh excuse for a holiday wrapped around it. It’s this portability that turns signing up for a race into a whole vacation.
But it is worth noticing that the bigger draw is community. Gary Wan, managing director of HYROX Asia-Pacific, points to a broader shift away from solo gym memberships and toward “community-led, event-based fitness experiences.”
Unlike a marathon or triathlon, HYROX doesn’t demand years of specialised training to start; it simply rewards the gym habits people already have, which is why entire training studios end up travelling to races together.
Hyatt, which now runs the region’s official HYROX hotel programme, corroborates this, where people are increasingly choosing destinations around their passions and communities, not just sightseeing—wellness travel that’s less about spas and more about “movement, performance, recovery and connection.”
That appeal shows up in how people actually build these trips.
Singapore-based orthopaedic surgeon Alan Cheung has completed nine HYROX races, six of them overseas across Seoul, Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Taipei and Bangkok—using each one as much as a way to reconnect with friends and relatives living abroad as a competition to win.
For fellow Singaporean Angus Tan, a fitness influencer who flew to Jakarta with his partner for his first overseas race, the pull is partly practical—a short flight, minimal leave needed—but mostly about what the race gives the rest of the trip. “There’s something really satisfying about earning your holiday,” he told CNA Luxury.
For some, the race becomes the reason a family finally gets together. When Singapore marketing lead Amelia Yeo signed up for her first HYROX in Incheon, her parents, brother and his girlfriend flew out to support her, turning into the family’s first holiday together in almost eight years.
And for whole gyms, the race-cation becomes a group pilgrimage: Hong Kong’s DOP Training Club brought around 90 members, roughly 70% of its membership, to Bangkok in Mar 2026, closing the gym for the week so the club could compete and celebrate together, continuing a pattern of earlier group trips to Taipei, Kobe and Beijing.
None of this is cheap, either, which is arguably the more telling part.
A single HYROX entry here in Singapore can run S$147–S$196 for singles before any flights or hotels are added on, and racers typically spend months training specifically for one weekend. That’s a significant jump from last year’s S$128-S$174.
Demand hasn’t budged regardless of the increase in prices.
When HYROX’s Bangkok 2025 debut sold out 4,500 spots within 18 hours, it was an early signal of appetite that’s only grown since. This is despite Bangkok hotel bookings at the time running roughly 32% ahead of the same period last year.
For a lot of racers, the entry fee, the flight and the months of training aren’t a deterrent, but may be what makes the finish line worth flying for in the first place.
Singapore & Singaporeans are jumping on the bandwagon
Beyond HYROX, Singaporeans are also willing to fly out for other fitness events.
Local publication SportPlus lists races like the Amazing Thailand Marathon Bangkok, ASICS Gold Coast Marathon, and the Great Wall Marathon among the international events drawing regional runners, alongside long-time favourites like the Tokyo, Seoul and Osaka marathons.
This regional travel-for-a-race pattern now has numbers to back it up, too. Similar to race-cation, travel platform Agoda has coined the term “run-cation” for the phenomenon of people travelling for marathons.
Agoda found that accommodation searches around the Amazing Thailand Marathon Bangkok 2026, the Mt. Fuji International Marathon 2026 and the JTBC Seoul Marathon 2026 surged between 19% and 73% for the respective races compared to 2025. And Singapore was named among the other markets showing strong travel interest around these same race weekends.
At the same time, Singapore is also pulling in fitness enthusiasts from all over the world.
HYROX’s fifth Singapore edition, held over 29–30 Nov 2025 at Singapore Expo as part of the Singapore Urban Sports + Fitness Festival, drew close to 10,400 athletes and more than 2,200 of them were international competitors who flew in specifically for the race.
One of them was Vijay Andrews, a 32-year-old Indian fitness coach who’d spent months recovering from an injury that kept him out of a HYROX event in New Delhi earlier in the year. When he heard Singapore’s edition was coming up, he booked his flight.
“Singapore was geographically the closest country where a Hyrox was soon happening,” he told the South China Morning Post. “I love travelling and I love fitness, so it worked out very well for me.” That’s the race-cation logic in one sentence—the race picks the destination, and the trip follows.
By Apr 2026, the event had outgrown our Expo entirely. HYROX took over the National Stadium for the first time, running a three-day format that drew more than 14,000 athletes from 58 countries, aged 16 to 74.
What’s interesting is that growth is backed by the Singapore government.
Moreover, last year’s AIA HYROX headlined a wider festival, the Singapore Urban Sports + Fitness Festival, which closed with a record 90,000 attendees across three weekends, up roughly 30% compared to the year before.
The second Singapore HYROX edition of the year is already confirmed, running Nov 27-29.
Singapore’s growing wellness economy
Singapore’s wellness economy is part of that same wave.
It was valued at US$23.2 billion (S$29.5 billion) in 2024, climbing to #37 globally from #42 in 2021, with per-capita spending of US$3,845 (S$4,894)—more than eight times the Asian regional average, and annual growth of 7.79%, ranking #10 globally, according to the Global Wellness Institute’s research with STB.
Singapore’s urban infrastructure is also increasingly being built around fitness, too.
In late 2025, STB awarded a S$1 billion tender to Therme Group for a large-scale wellness attraction along Marina South Coastal, targeted for 2030 and expected to draw two million visitors a year, nearly half from overseas. Singapore marks the group’s first international move outside of Europe, revealing just how important Singapore is growing as a wellness destination.
Compared to our previous study of HYROX in Singapore, this race-cation phenomenon doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
Every quarter brings a new host city, a new sold-out ticket window, a new group of gym-mates deciding whether a race weekend abroad is worth the flight, with finisher patches to collect and content to share on social media as a visible record of every city raced in.
The workout itself isn’t new. What’s changed is that a fitness class has become something people plan a whole trip around, train months to earn, and fly across the region to share with the people who train alongside them.
The race gives these trips a reason. Everything else—the city, the food, the extra few days off—is just the reward for having shown up at the start line.
- Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.
Featured Image Credit: Dan Yeung, Ahotu
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