Spa managers have called on hoteliers for more support and understanding to develop appropriate benchmarks to measure their performance.
Speaking at the Hotelier Middle East roundtable held at Raffles Dubai last month, Shangri La Hotel Dubai health club and spa manager Mike Monsod said the spa industry was “quite mysterious” because it did not frequently exchange performance figures between facilities.
“I think the spa industry is very young in that sense,” he explained. “We are not as sophisticated or developed as the room side of the hotel where they have established networks and they do daily comparisons.
“I have been working with our revenue manager on this, and we have been trying to think how we can develop a credible measurement of our performance. The hotels have to support our efforts to make sure we can cross-check our figures with our competitors.”
Park Hyatt Dubai spa director Jason Sloan said that in many ways the issue was caused by the difficulty of measuring an intangible asset.
“You can’t really quantify it, because it is the jewel in the crown,” he added.
“Hoteliers treat the spa as another F&B outlet, they look at profitability and compare it on area, and you just can’t do that. They don’t look at a room as a resource or a therapist as a resource. It’s a constant battle, and you can’t quantify when you have something that is a jewel in the crown.”
Although many spa managers at the roundtable expressed frustration that their industry was misunderstood, hoteliers were slowly being won over, said Kempinski Hotel Mall of the Emirates Dubai Softouch Spa director V.L Shyam.
“When I started at the Kempinski Ajman we had to provide a lot of pressure to convert three of the guestrooms into a spa,” he said.
“But we were able to prove we could provide better returns than the guest rooms, not only in direct revenues but in indirect revenues from longer stays and so on.”
Some Kempinski resorts now generated 30% of revenue from their spa, he said.
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