Former head of global spa operations at FRHI, Anne McCall Wilson, has revealed she is perplexed by the continued lack of participation in benchmarking programmes by spas.

Having launched her own boutique strategic advisory consultancy, McCall & Wilson, McCall Wilson advocated the standard reporting system for spas set up by Smith Travel Research (STR) – prompted by a benchmarking session at the first Global Spa & Wellness Summit in 2007.

STR collects statistics on spa revenue, utilisation and space allocation – something which McCall Wilson believes is necessary for the financial considerations of spa businesses globally.

“After several years, participation still remains very low,” McCall Wilson said in a letter published in the Q2 2014 edition ofSpa Business. “Everyone agrees it’s needed, but how do we get businesses to actually participate? Maybe we need owners, lenders and asset companies to ask that question.”

She added that, more importantly, benchmarking puts the focus on what drives real value in spa businesses.

“We need to focus on building the spa top line,” McCall Wilson continued. “This means not only building revenue management skill sets and tools for our leaders, but also developing a revenue culture in our business.”

Pinpointing these key factors forces spas to think critically about who their customers are. “Knowing who the customer is drives everything – space, design and programming,” she added.

McCall Wilson laments spa companies’ reluctance up to benchmarking programmes – such as STR or the online SpaUK KPI database – because they can provide "valuable data for profit and loss allocation."