Wellness is an area which is growing in importance for guests and hotels, but the technology often fails to keep pace, leading to disappointing service, lost revenue and operational confusion. Many of the current systems are clunky and don’t connect well to other platforms, creating workarounds and operational burden, so it’s natural to be considering a change.
The first place to start asking questions is the spa front desk. We’re often bought in because the wellness expectation of guests is changing, and the positioning of wellness in hospitality is evolving to be much more holistic, which exposes capability gaps in the incumbent system. The reality is often that, when you speak to the people running the spa, you learn that the system appears to be functionally capable, but either not optimized for the service offering, or running in tandem with activities platforms creating attrition across finite spaces and resources. For example, the gym and the spa typically overlap in requirement, leading to inaccurate revenue attribution and yield optimization.
If you assess your system top down you don’t get the full picture required to make such an operationally consequential decision. You could easily replace it, only to suffer the same problems downstream. When I'm speaking to hotels and clubs I make sure I speak to the operations team as well as commercial; only then can you develop a clear strategy. The reason they work with a trusted adviser is that we can capture the operational reality about how their system(s) are currently configured, and help them achieve the operational and commercial goals in tandem. It’s not always about selecting a new system, and although there is usually value in conducting a market review against the business requirement, it can be about working more effectively with what you have.
If you do decide to go ahead and change your platform, much depends on whether you’re using a property management system that has spa capabilities, or you’re using a standalone PMS and connecting it to a spa platform. If it’s the latter, be wary of platforms which are more generalist, more useful in high street spa operations. In a hotel, the spa is part of the whole guest experience; the guest and the team need to be able access the spa booking, and it needs to be visible at checkout. There are platforms out there that have certain integrations, or of course have the ability to self-serve through an OpenAPI, but not others. You should also consider what might happen if you change your technology landscape in the future. If a PMS review, or payment gateway review, is in the cards, this should factor into that decision from a strategic lens.
Selecting an alternative suitable spa platform, or "wellness" platform as is often the case for many, should not only fit the operational requirement and the variety of services/treatment offerings the guest expects today, but also center around being able to connect to the overall member experience. This is particularly true if you offer stay packages that include treatments or classes, as well as offer guest booking via a mobile guest application. A property might have paddle courts, swimming pools, gym classes and personal training on top of treatments. Measuring the occupancy and yield of their connected gym equipment and ensuring the treatment rooms are optimizing their revenue is crucial, however, ensuring the guest can choose how they want to consume these services will further drive revenues. Class passes, courses of personal training, guest passes, gift cards — all of which may need to be managed through rules-based configurable membership tiers.
Add into this that one operation’s definition of wellness can be very different to another’s depending on the positioning of the offering. There's a blurred line between events, activities and wellness, because, although there may be a gym, what actually falls under a wellness activity? Is it lying in a hot tub with a bottle of champagne, or is it rowing across a lake? If your property positions itself around balanced lifestyle, it only works if you treat wellness, not as an add-on module, but as part of the overall guest experience.
Most platforms can cope with a conventional spa offering, but when it comes to the growing diversification, newer platforms might be more capable. However, you might already have a platform that's so well-integrated and that everybody knows how to use, that the impact on your team of changing it would not justify the additional function. The most important factors are ensuring that it can fulfil all the requirements of both guests and operations, creating and supporting a consistent revenue stream and building an accurate picture of its commercial success so that it operates efficiently and profitably.
Joshua Beagrie is a consultant at Hospitality Technology Advisory and based in the United Kingdom.
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