| Hotel Spas 101 |
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Having
a spa in your hotel is nice but the spa doesn’t stop at the spa’s
entryway. To truly embrace the spa experience and market that
experience to your clients it is necessary to also have spa amenities in
each guest’s room. I want to share some personal notes with you
before I launch into ideas for enhancing your hotel. I travel
extensively. One of my favorite hotels is the Westin. Why?
They have the best pillows on the face of the earth! Their bedding is
extra opulent and after a day’s worth of consulting or training this tired
head appreciates that extra fluffy pillow. My husband and I recently
trekked out to Chicago where my association, The Spa Association (SPAA), was
hosting a spa track at a convention. As we were packing I noticed that
he wasn’t packing work out gear. He simply commented that amenities
like fitness areas and spas were never great at hotels so why bother. These
two vignettes absolutely speak volumes on how to serve guests—give them
the little extras. Give them more than they expect. Your spa can
help you do that!
Theme
The
theme of your hotel should match the theme of your spa and that theme should
consistently run through every element of the guest’s experience.
The theme that you choose for your hotel or spa addition might have to do
with your geographical area. It might also have to do with the type of
emphasis on theme experienced in your restaurant. Themes are also
successfully built on things like historical era, international or cultural
schemes, experiential themes (think Disney). That theme needs to be
tied to your approach to customers, their experience in the spa and their
experience in their rooms. Call the Paris hotel in Las Vegas and you
will experience some of that—“Bonjour” as a greeting, for instance.
Your Spa Menu
The
same feel of your theme should be represented in your spa menu. This
means that if you are the Venetian you should be representing the Italian
types of treatments and therapies. If you are, on the other hand, a
Greco-Roman spa, the Roman bath themed modalities are the track you should
be on. Your menu should evoke the feel of your theme as well as the
represent the theme of your hotel. When creating your menu keep “passive
treatments” in mind as profit builders. Passive treatments are those
services requiring little or no attention by your spa technicians. Things
like hydrotherapy, Vichy showers, oxygen bars, steam rooms and dry saunas
are all amenities that you can either offer for free as a perk or that can
be built in to other services as packages. While hydrotherapy bath
might go for $45 for 20 minutes your product and labor costs to offer such a
service are almost non-existent. Furthermore, throwing in a service
like a eucalyptus steam will allow you to get more money from your core
services and will add a flare of professionalism and extravagance to your
overall offerings.
Presence in your Hotel
Don’t
think that just having a spa in your hotel will be enough to market the
facility to your guests. Your spa is a part of your hotel and just
like any loved family member, needs to be present everywhere the guest goes
during their stay. Have your “on hold” message system mention spa
features and promotions. Entice the guest into visiting your spa with
luscious descriptions of relaxing pleasures offered at your spa. Have spa
information present at the front desk and tuck marketing pieces into the
room key cardholder. Have a spa menu selection in your restaurant and
advertise the most popular spa services within your menu. Market to
both your local market and your in-house guests. Your spa is a
resource for profit. Don’t take that lightly. Place information
about your spa in absolutely every ad and publicity campaign that you
participate in. You can’t avoid your spa and expect it to be profitable.
It needs to be advertised, celebrated and promoted just as much as your
hotel.
Presence in the Room
To
a great extent your guests judge the hotel by their in-room experience.
I have stayed at many hotels with opulent entryways and beautiful lobbies.
The same hotels have many times had plain, small, dirty, uncomfortable, dank
rooms. I’m not sleeping in the lobby; I’m sleeping in the room!
One
way to perk up the guest’s experience is to truly extend a little
hospitality and share some spa perks with them in their room. This can
be as extravagant as making every shower a steam shower or having Swiss
showers in every room. If you don’t want to go quite to that extent,
try offering a private labeled line with your hotel’s signature on the
label. Add some exotic elements to the typical bathroom fare that hotels
offer. For instance, make your soap a multi grained soap or a scrub.
Throw in a loofah or specialty sponge (they go for around .15). Add a
tea candle (again you are looking at cents). These little special
touches make such a big difference to the guest and they cost the hotel very
little in overhead.
Put
a little note on the pillow of each guest with their chocolate that suggests
a massage before bed. Offer spa services on the breakfast hang tab so
the guest doesn’t need to lift a finger to secure an appointment for the
next day. Advertise your spa on the room’s TV. Have a presence in
the room!
Having a spa in your hotel can be enormously profitable if you simply explore all of the options out there for recruiting and keeping clients. Your spa is not a problem unless you ignore it. Your spa is a profit center.
Melinda Minton is a spa consultant and health and beauty expert living in Fort Collins, Colorado. Minton is a licensed massage therapist, esthetician and cosmetologist with an MBA in marketing. A past spa owner, Minton now consults on spa management issues, product formulations, spa profitability and strategy. Minton Business Solutions has worked on hundreds of projects involving everything from spa start ups to launching marketing programs for Fortune 500 companies. Minton is the founder of The Spa Association, a world-class organization dedicated to enriching the professional beauty industry through self regulation, education and sound business practices. SPAA is quickly becoming the country’s largest spa association. Melinda has written countless consumer and trade publications and speaks around the country on health, beauty and the business of professional beauty. Among the resources recently launched by Minton Business Solutions are a CD on running your financial numbers for profitability and management efficiency, an online selection of modules for everything from human resources to selling retail.
Photo copyright 2002, Julie
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