Spa & Wellness Integration in New Hotel & Resort Development
By Omer Isvan
The intimacy between wellness and hospitality is a centuries old phenomenon, as old as Asklepion, which then for many decades became somewhat out-of-sight. As it was in history, hospitality was a natural necessity ''add-on'' to the curative or preventive destination wellness until the early 80's when quite suddenly wellness became ''the thing'' to integrate into hotels and resorts as an ''add-on'', often called a Spa, replacing the formula of a few pieces of fitness equipment and a sauna or steam room.
Origins
In the beginning of this four-decade era, existing hotels started to convert certain spaces into spas with varying levels of prominence depending on the availability and quality of retrofit-worthy space. Many spas ended up in basement floors through conversion of lesser used meeting facilities or indeed back-of-house spaces. Moving time further into early 21st century, the spa was a dark, candle-lit, lemon grass scented space with bamboo, Buddha, water, pebble and orchid features backed-up by some aquatic sounding relaxation tune.
In traditional Europe and in areas under that influence, slightly less romantic, more clinical or function-focused, equipment-intensive formulas emerged. The evolution was spectacular particularly with new-build hotels and resorts with larger, purpose- designed spas, the one-upmanship game focusing on the number of treatment rooms, size of total floor area and perhaps the brand of treatment products used or the impressiveness of novelty spa equipment and installations. In this rapid growth period, spas indisputably added an enriching dimension to a hotel's guest experience, a competitive advantage, positioning strength and often created a positive bottom-line impact whether directly or not.
The omnipresence and accessibility of the hotel spa became an early educator for the consumer, creating not only an awareness of wellness but also stimulating a certain hype-like growth in demand. The spa supply became a phenomenal trend in the hospitality world, becoming not only ubiquitous but also somewhat formulaic.
The hospitality industry seemed able to deliver with the formulaic spa with a team of massage therapists led by a spa manager, often an experienced therapist, satisfying what appeared to be the demand. However, spa-goer expectations stiffened and evolved much faster than the speed with which many hotel operators could adapt and were able to deliver the software content that was needed.
Specialization
Software in this instance is a combination of spa-specific service, R&D, talent acquisition, training & development, programming, communications, dynamic procurement and management. Not surprisingly and as we saw in the arena of food & beverage, third party specialist operators and brands- often regional and very few global such as Espa- began to enter hotel and resort spas, not infrequently implanted within globally branded and operated properties.
While the larger system hospitality operators generally lagged behind and stuck to the formulaic approach, only few small-footprint operators – typically in the luxury space – were able to keep up with the discerning demand and very few that were already quite spa-centric niche operators emerged as global hospitality operators that understood and can truly deliver wellness as part of the total hospitality experience.
Destination wellness still largely remained in the hands of specialist stand-alone institutions such as Chiva-Som, Ananda, Sha, Kamalaya, Lanserhof, Golden Door, Mayr and Canyon Ranch, as well as other specialist stand-alone, often founder-led ones dotted around the world, with baby steps –if any at all- to expand beyond their home bases. This landscape remains quite similar today.
The hotel spa suffers due to this formulaic copy-paste approach, resulting in a population of indiscriminately conceived temples of wellness with very similar physical content and scarce intellectual, empirical or scientific software and talent.
Transformation
In the meantime, the wellness industry is going through major growth and transformation. Now a mega sector with c. 4 Trillion USD accounting for more than 5% of the world economic output, the industry encompasses, as most relevant to this subject, wellness tourism with a c. 639 Billion USD economy and the spa industry with c. 176 Billion including the thermal and mineral sub-sectors.
What we need to be aware of is the fact that the spa and wellness industry used to be the authority and trend-maker for an individual's wellness. Individuals happily let the industry decide what is good for them and unquestioningly received the delivery and direction. No longer. The information age, technology and heightened awareness of personal wellbeing have collectively caused a shift (or a strong trend towards a shift) of the leadership and authority of one's personal wellness from the hands of the wellness industry to the hands of the individual.
People now research, benchmark, test, set goals and highly personalize, customize and orchestrate their own wellness regime in a dynamic manner. In addition to this, the pace of life and instant access to and choice of related goods and services in urban settings have culminated in four distinct qualities in demand: (i) High & visible impact (ii) Highly specialized (iii) Highly Authentic (iv) High Speed.
What does all this mean for the spa industry with some 2,5 million employees at some 150,000 establishments around the globe and what are the implications for the hotel and resort spa? A lot.
Gone are the days when the consumer accumulated all the sins of counter-wellbeing behavior until the spa retreat where all those sins were to be erased and systems to be re-booted to factory settings. The era now is dominated by a quest to eliminate preventable disease – if not quite yet a quest for near eternal life- which means that wellness becomes holistically an integrated element of daily life from workplace to round-the-clock personal space.
From Uber-like delivery of massage, customized gourmet health food or the obscurest nutritive, curative, preventive ingredients from around the globe to personal trainers, yoga instructors or meditation at the swipe of a smartphone and to digital monitoring of daily steps or sleep patterns, our guests are more and more engaged and educated in wellness. They now arrive at spas and say one or more of the following: (i) ''understand my routine, catch my vibe and harmoniously complement it'' and perhaps more challengingly (ii) ''blow my mind with a highly effective take home value piece that is supplementary to my regime'' (ii) "I am here to see transformative results on a specific area or issue related to mind body or spirit- and nothing much else."
Based on their segmentation, specialist medical spas and wellness retreats and some destination wellness establishments are sufficiently equipped with their science, technology and talent to deliver to the next generation guests by gradually adapting to and complementing this wave of personalized, self-orchestrated wellness regimes. Most hotel and resort spas are not.
The efforts needed to respond to the change of demand and to be ready are so great even in terms of software let alone capex, that hoteliers- unless spa centric- will find the effort-reward balance questionable if not overly distracting from their core hospitality agenda. Many hoteliers will be right in their pure financial assessment of effort-reward imbalance depending on the nature, size and location of their property and let their existing spas and wellness operations remain as is, accepting their slow demise or prudently shrink or even exit from their wellness space. Some of those hoteliers however, will have been wrong to have assessed effort-reward based on financial metrics alone or spa business alone and will suffer opportunity losses if not actual bottom-line erosions considering their property as a whole.
The Need to Adapt
One caution for those hotels not adapting and sharpening-up, whether allowing a slow demise, shrinking or converting the spa and wellness space: For the next generation, the hospitality product has to integrate wellness into its formula one way or another, not because it needs to attract spa-goers or seekers of a wellness temple, remedy or transformative experience but because it needs to attract people. The minimum denominator therefore should be to provide the right infrastructure and environment for wellness-integrated, self-directed individuals to continue their ordinary routines and regimes.
I am purposely over-stating what I see as emerging trends so that in an era of ultra-rapid change in consumption modality, we are able to move in the right direction ahead of the total reshape of the spa-goer profile. The said trends obviously do not define the entirety of the world of wellness today and while we need to change, there are still plenty of guests saying ''relax me, pamper me, gratify me, reduce the effects of my unhealthy lifestyle even if only marginal'' but we need to be aware that even that baseline spa demand is becoming highly discerning and selective.
In the last 15 years or so, most hospitality development stakeholders (with few exceptions globally) including the investor, the brand/operator and the design teams have collectively been quite detached from the emerging trends in wellness. The formulaic base approach to building hotel and resort spas has simply resulted in bigger, prettier, richer spas rather than evolving through the necessary brain map starting with ''why spa?''. If a compelling, holistically sensible rationale considering the whole hotel, its location, segmentation, positioning, total experience design, USP's, competitive arguments and the related financial feasibility is found, only then, you ask ''what spa?''.
The talent and thought contributors to this "what spa" phase needs to be collective, vastly enhanced and typically extends well beyond what is offered by most investors, architects, designers, wet area consultants or indeed equipment suppliers. Clever developers who go one step further to engage a spa consultant often fall into the trap of engaging them well after the ''why spa'' stage and often even after the outer boundaries are set, ending up with a perfect spa to the extent possible within those boundaries and with a total disconnect between the spa and the rest of the hotel .
It is obvious then, that the brain team at the outset requires the presence of an independent expert concept curator and orchestrator, first testing, verifying then further structuring the investment idea against the highest & best use of real estate. They have to then integrate the core hospitality piece with all the specialist sub-disciplines to arrive at a hotel configuration that optimizes competitive arguments and USP's, fills supply gaps, targets market consumption trends, financial feasibility, technology, constraints and produces holistic staying power.
Refining the Spa Concept
The hotel's umbrella brand and operating partner as well as integrated specialist operators such as spa, wellness or restaurant(s), architects and designers should be selected only thereafter to closely match the concept and to participate in further developing, challenging and refining that objectively defined total concept. Total hotel & resort curation and conceptualization expertise is a separate research, experience, art & science based profession that unfortunately cannot be replaced by a kit of parts consisting of specialist area consultants, even though they each have very valuable and essential input and direction to provide during development.
In fact, the holistic expertise is one of very few chances an investor may have to rethink the entire investment idea and pursue alternatives if such may be the case. As obvious as this may sound, I see far too many developments where the author of ''why hotel'' is somewhat lost in oblivion while the author of ''what hotel'' is either the investor and/or its architects and/or its selected operator. Other than in rare cases where the investor is an expert in the business of hospitality with all the in-house talent, R&D and global experience, then a big note of caution is due; neither (i) an architect comes equipped (nor is it the architect's job to be so equipped) enough to understand the market needs, consumer trends and business dynamics nor (ii) an already selected operator (by definition) comes with the objective latitude and a blank-page to carefully curate a fit-to-market hotel.
Moreover, save for very few niche market brands or smaller footprint exclusive brands, I find that (particularly larger) chain operators are becoming less and less able to provide the necessary amount and quality of experienced talent to direct or curate a new hotel. Often the brand technical services teams lack the authority to innovate and update established brand habits much beyond ensuring the integration of ''fit-all'' brand standards that (a) by definition ignore the pinpoint accuracy of the cultural and competitive location drivers and (b) were written sometime back, missing the accuracy of ''today'' and today's foreseeable trends.
As we unfortunately see too often, if the answer to ''what hotel'' was not authored by an independent holistic expert it may still result in a great looking, well-built, well equipped, operationally efficient, handsomely branded hotel but ultimately may still be the wrong hotel. In that context one can imagine how the ''what spa'' question was insufficiently addressed, let alone how wellness would be integrated to the entire guest experience in the hotel!
In today's world of hospitality, there is a high likelihood that one can find a suitable hotel brand/operator that is a close match to the concept, location and target market. These well matched partners can typically bring the necessary marketing power, brand perception, operations know-how and distribution. Conversely, the same cannot be said for the new-era spa and wellness element, where the choice of partners that can provide content and software is quite limited. Depending on the answer of ''what spa'', particularly as you climb up the ladder of transformative wellness, uniqueness, authenticity and results-orientation in your aspired wellness product, the software and content package may become truly hard to find. The rare exception to this is when the conceived total concept and segmentation suits one of the very few spa-centric hospitality operators such as Six Senses, Banyan Tree, Como.
Finding the Right Solution
This leads to another caution: if the investor (through the right analytic route and concepting methodology described) wishes to create a version or even a component of the likes of Viva Mayr, Canyon Ranch, Lanserhof, Ananda, Osho, Kamalaya or Chiva Som, then very early in the development phase, a full certainty of the software content and talent package must be secured unless the investor (a) wishes to start a new and highly specialized wellness business in addition to being a hotel or resort investor-owner or (b) takes the chance of building a mismatched and unfeasible hardware for what the ultimate de-facto spa content could be.
The summary message is: any greenfield hotel or resort development with wellness content should address the wellness concept and content early with the right consultants and a holistic orchestrator for the totality of the hotel or resort. We need to be aware that consumer trends and ''welltech'' are forcing the extinction of the hotel spa formula which was well memorized by so many development stakeholders. No, the spa is not necessarily a part of every hotel's program. Trends are in multitudes and not always coherently related so that the synthesis of a spa should embrace some while ignoring other trends and buzz pieces depending on objectives, segmentation and total concept.
Touching on some trends and key parameters, the spa syntheses have to address the mix or choose between: Zen & Vibrancy, Privacy & ''Co-Spaing'', Tech & Touch, Mind & Body, Natural & Synthetic, Health & Beauty as well as, perhaps more importantly, Medical & Alternative, Invasive & Non Invasive. Furthermore, to avoid a haphazard patchwork and to ensure a cohesive integrative wellness product, developers should carefully avoid introducing ''trendy'' or so called ''wow effect'' pieces just because someone saw or heard of them without careful evaluation. This evaluation should ensure that whatever the buzzword, it is complementary and meaningful to the overall concept and target clientele.
Just for fun, some of such current elements that could resonate or not with a spa & wellness concept could be listed as: biophilic design, apitherapy, precious metal ions, amber, cannabidiol, digital therapeutics, VR, cryotherapy, IV drips, semiprecious minerals & crystal healing, sophrology, halo therapy, sound healing, TRE, micro needling, ionized clay, quartz, oxygen and cool pods, brain photobiomodulation, laser Genesis, transcranial current stimulation, aerial yoga and more.
The good news is, given that not every hotel should have a full spectrum spa and given that the next generation guests will be fine as long as they can pursue their own wellness routine in an enabling environment, the hotel spa could also be as precise and specialized as the demand warrants, focusing on a narrow range of high impact, transformative supplements to personal wellness regimes.
