10 minute read
Travel Trends
How Spa Management Software Makes Your Life Easier By Spa Executive Technology
If you’re managing a spa, you’re pulled in a millions different directions at once. Spa management software can make your life a lot easier.
Advertisement
Running a spa means juggling a lot to keep things running smoothly. There’s so much to do, from booking appointments and looking after guests, to managing and supporting your staff, day-to-day administration, tracking KPIs, and keeping stakeholders happy –often while understaffed.
There are ways to make this life easier with spa management software.
Software is an incredible tool that can help you streamline operations, track data, understand your business operations, take care of admin work, maintain guest relationships, and more.
Here’s how spa management software makes your life easier.
If you’re using other systems, like a property management system, point of sale system, or access control system, you want to integrate all your systems for a seamless guest experience, to save time, and to make everything more efficient. In software, an integration is where two solutions exchange data.
Say Company A is a retail POS solution and Company B is an eCommerce solution. A retail business that uses Company A’s solution for instore purchases and Company B’s solution for online purchases without an integration has to manually track stock levels every time a sale is made online or in store, to ensure they don’t sell something they don’t have. This is a tedious and time-consuming task that leaves plenty of room for error.
An integration allows Company B to share transaction information with Company A and vice versa, and inventory levels are adjusted automatically. Easy.
This is just one example of how software integrations make life easy. Integrations allow businesses to save time, improve customer experience, run smoothly and do things they would never be able to do otherwise.
Understanding your Business Operations is Easy
A comprehensive reporting suite is the key to understanding what’s happening in your business, so you can see what’s working and what isn’t, optimize operations and set realistic projections for the future based on real-time data.
Tracking your KPIs manually is a time-consuming nightmare and there is no excuse for doing it anymore. Data is king and you must be able to access and understand your own data if you want to be competitive in today’s market. Real-time intelligence and dashboards provide you with reports on occupancy, operational efficiency, sales performance, and other KPIs (service specific reports, for example, allow you to conduct analyses of the success/failure of special promotions) and are easy to export to Excel. All of this puts the power to improve your business into your own hands.
Administrative Tasks are Easy
The right software takes care of administrative tasks so that you can focus on the guest experience. For example, you can save hours of time with automated end-of-day reports and financial summaries, and calculation of pay rates and commissions earned on products and services sold. The information you need is easily extracted, making payroll the information you need to run payroll.
Shane Bird, Director of Spa Operations at Turning Stone Resort Casino told us that using Book4Time’s booking and payment systems allowed Turning Stone to reduce time spent on payroll from 6-7 hours a week to about 15 minutes. This is a 95% reduction in time spent or 350 hours saved per year. Bird also said, “It was taking another 5-6 hours every day for someone in finance to sit and audit the transactions. Book4Time has eliminated all of that. We estimate that our time spent on administrative tasks overall was reduced by about 92%, which is monstrous.”
Software will also automatically track loyalty points and update balances on customer accounts. It easily integrates with a hotel PMS, processes room charges in real-time, and can transfer all spa revenue to your hotel system. Plus, inventory management is a breeze when you can centrally track and view balances across all of your locations in real time with a central, cloud-based online tool. Track purchase order progress in real time over the cloud, automatically update on-hand counts, easily record received products, and more.
Personalizing the Guest Experience is Easy
Centrally managed notes, guest profiling, and automatic alerts allow you to log all of your guest information, build customer profiles, and give your staff quick access to that information, across multiple locations. This makes it easy to personalize guest experience, no matter which of your spas they’re visiting.
Build relationships and make emotional connections. Be ready before the guest arrives at your spa. Access purchase history, preferences, and more, collected across multiple points of contact. Keep notes of customers’ important dates, like birthdays and anniversaries, and records of conversation topics, so staff and therapists can pick up where they left off and ask about that recent trip to Europe or family member’s graduation.
This level of personalization makes people feel seen and appreciated and there is no stronger relationship builder than making someone feel seen and appreciated. Justifying your Needs is Easy
Hotel and resort spa directors may have to go through several layers of approval before being able to upgrade or make any changes. Spa and wellness has traditionally had a difficult time justifying costs and is often regarded as an afterthought. Stakeholders want to see that their investment will be returned, which is hard to demonstrate without evidence of past success. Comprehensive reporting dashboards are the answer. With these, it’s easy to pull up the numbers to show exactly how well your spa is doing, how it could be doing better, and exactly what you need to make that happen. The proof is at your fingertips.
Daisy Tepper, Spa Director at The Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston, a Forbes Five Star hotel and spa, is a great example. She used Book4Time’s reports to justify the cost of a new treatment room. She said, “The treatment room utilization shows us how much money our rooms are pulling in and what we can do better regarding occupancy. This report actually allowed me to justify the cost of a new treatment room for the spa. The owner of the Post Oak is all about performance and he needs to see justification before he can decide if he’s going to expand the spa and how. I ran the report and he could immediately see the benefit, so he gave me the money to build another one. I’m happy to report that we’re getting a beautiful new couples suite with a fireplace!” Are you Ready to Make your Life Easier?
There are a number of different spa management software solutions on the market. One of the top platforms for hotels and spas today is Book4Time, which offers more than 200 reports and has the widest scope of integrations in the industry. There are many things our customers love about our software, but we think the one thing we hear most often is that they love how easy it is to use.
Daisy Tepper, who we mentioned above, Spa Director at the Post Oak Hotel, said, “When you hire someone, the easier the system is for them to learn, the better for us. [Book4Time is] very userfriendly. That’s what I was looking for, and that’s what I got.”
Vivian Villamizar, Spa Director at The Palms AVEDA Spa, Miami Beach, also told Spa Executive that Book4Time is “very user friendly.” She said, “I have therapists who didn’t even dare to use our system before, They now feel very confident about using the software system.”
And Jane Fellows, Spa Manager at The Willow Stream Spa at the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa, said, “I think the thing that I hear from most of the team is that they like the ease of actually reading the diary and the interface itself. If you’ve got a busy day, it’s easy to look at the screen and you can see the provider, the guest, the treatment, the room that will be used. It’s very straightforward. They don’t have to dig into anything to find any information.
“It’s very simple and easy to read. I run a report and it’s got what I need.”
[Doc: La Thalasso Serge Blanco]
Top Six Travel Spa Trends
By Global Wellness Summit
The Global Wellness Summit, offered a much broader wellness focus than when it first launched in 2007 as the Global Spa Summit. But the spa industry continues to be a vital part of the wide spectrum of wellness businesses in the annual event.
When Travel Market Report asked a few attendees to weigh in on new developments we might see in 2021 and beyond, they suggested the following: 1. Spas Meet Medicine
Andrew Gibson, vice president of spa and wellness for FRHI Hotels and Resorts (Fairmont, Raffles, and Swissotel), foresees the continuing convergence of spas and hotels with the medical world.
“The realms of medical wellness and medi spas are already immensely popular in many parts of the world,” he said. “Many private hospitals are already delivering five-star customer service, and there will soon be more medical hotels where patients become guests. There will not only be inpatient facilities for guests (i.e., patients) but floors for family and friends to stay. Once this happens, the facilities will match those of any quality hotel, with superb F&B and spa facilities.”
2. A Global Chain Of Destination Spas
With more than 30 years of international spa and hospitality experience to his credit, Gibson predicted that a global chain of destination spas will be launched in the near future. At present, he said, “destination spas rely on the passion of an individual or couple to create the retreat and build up from this passion. There is now enough knowledge and public awareness of wellness retreats to make it conceivable to create a global destination spa group.” 3. Innovative Tech Treatments
Technology will, of course, become a prevailing feature in the spas of the future. “Technology will begin to feature heavily in the guest experience, from the design of the spa to the check-in and guest history process, to the use of machines in treatments,” Gibson said.
Kim Matheson, senior vice president of Rockville, MD-based WTS International, consultants to spa, fitness, and hospitality facilities around the world, agreed. “We'll see technology not only in the guest journey itself, but also the use of innovative technology in treatments and to offer such alternative modalities as chromotherapy,” she said. 4. Wellness Communities
Matheson also sees the growth of spas at the center of new wellness communities. As evidenced by new global developments, residential communities are embracing spa and well-being services as a point of differentiation. “These lifestyle-based communities/developments have enjoyed a positive and discernable impact, with a significant increase in value in comparison to other comparable properties,” she said. She cites the example of a hotel and residential wellness community she is working with in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which is developing several wellness-based communities. The first, opening soon, will feature a wellness center with spa, fitness, wellness, and beauty services-all scientifically supported to yield measurable results. Which, she says, is another growing trend.
5. Putting The Science In The Spa Experience
Matheson predicts that spa menus will include more scientifically proven treatments with measurable results.
Josh Luckow, executive director of health and healing at Canyon Ranch, also sees “recent scientific advancements reinforcing the benefits of integrative and preventive medicine.”
Guests "are leveraging our health practitioners to explore the value of epigenetics, brain fitness, and the microbiome,” he said, and being “much more careful about what they are ingesting and inhaling, as well as about the ingredients they are putting on their skin.”
6. Giving Back
Luckow also has seen a big focus in the health and wellness industry on giving back/charity over the past few years. He predicts this way of promoting inner well-being also will continue.
