During the last 2 decades, hotels spas have been conceived and built as amenities to the hotel to boost the stay length of the guests.  Today, hotel executives realize that the gain in average stay does not offset the cost of building and maintaining such huge and expensive amenities.  The next challenge of the hotels will be to redesign these “spa dinosaurs” with proper floor plans and traffic flow, to support the spa operations and revenues, including spa retail sales while preserving the clients experience.

This last week, I received from a European spa architect the floor plan and photos of a new spa in a hotel in Europe.  The pictures are beautiful!  from an aesthetic perspective, it is a “master piece”!  But looking at the floor plan, the analysis is very different:  7,000 square feet with only 2 treatment rooms, and all the rest is amenities…  Not even a retail space…

The potential income of such a spa will never even pay for the maintenance costs!  When designing a spa, the spa designer or spa architect must value the ROI (return on investment) as much as the aesthetics of the spa!!

Spa design is based on 6 principles: The purpose of the spa, the vision of the owner, the projected clients experience, the technical requirements, the traffic flow (Feng SHui), and the budget. It is most important to define these elements before beginning the process of designing the floor plan and then after the interior design of the spa.

I conceive and design spa floor plans including lighting systems, plumbing, etc…, as well as the interior design of the structure, allowing the best traffic flow while utilizing the space at its best.
All these services have the same goal: Making sure you, the spa owner, have all necessary tools to have a thriving enterprise where clients have a unique experience.

The conception and design of a Spa needs to incorporate elements based on principles as opposite as fire and water. One needs to conceive a floor plan with a traffic flow based on strict technical requirements , maximizing the potential revenue per square foot, within a welcoming , peaceful and calm environment, while respecting the owner’s vision as well as the projected client’s experience, and all that within a defined budget.

A Spa is like a building: each and every element of its conception and design is a stone that is part of the foundation supporting the “building” or the ambiance of the spa if you will.  If the aesthetic elements are important in the creation of the ambiance, structural elements are even more essential to it. Here are 10 of these most important “ambiance building stones”

In a spa, two revenue centres generate income: treatments and retail sales. Even though treatments are the core of business of most spas, healthy retail sales create a better margin for the spa (because the profit ratio of selling a product is much higher than for a treatment). All consultants agree that to have a balanced income, a spa’s retail sales must generate at least 30 per cent of the overall revenue. And the more the better.

Most spa owners will tell you that they are in this industry to help people, to make clients feel good, to improve their clients’ skin conditions, to enhance their clients’ lives. But the truth is that the primary reason they are in this field must be to make money— because if they don’t make money, they won’t be able to improve their clients’ lives for very long. Therefore, productive retail is essential to just about any spa operation.

Read more about the science of retail design.