For the first time, this year’s Global Spa & Wellness Summit (GSWS) staged forums for six key industry sub-sectors.

Led by global leaders in the relative fields, the forums enabled players to strategise on how best to solve the greatest challenges facing their sub-sectors, as well to discuss collaborating to expand on joint opportunities.

Similar breakout sessions with some of the titles seen at this year’s GSWS had been explored in the past, but were never named. Now labeled as Forums, they will continue to be a fixture on the GSWS agenda going forward. What may change depending on industry trends, however, is the grouping. This year’s forums concluded with defining moments and points of action to work on in the future.

Global Hotel Spa Forum facilitator Anne McCall Wilson, from Fairmont, said the group prioritised the need for guest-centric research to find out what customers really want. At the same time, hotel spa operators recommitted to gathering consistent data for benchmarking.

Six Senses’ Anna Bjurtsam, who led the Global Spa Education Forum, said that in the future they’ll be focusing on selling the benefits of spa career to entice more people into our industry, as well as on spa management mentor and internship programmes. Whether there’s a need for spa management certification will be further explored.

Speaking on behalf of the Hydro-Thermal Forum, Don Genders of Design for Leisure emphasised that the most important thing is to establish an independent set of ISO quality standards for hydrothermal spa design to help educate the architectural, interior design and hotel engineering communities on technical specifications.

The design of spa retail areas is not working, said Mandara’s Jeff Matthews from the Global Spa Retail Forum. In addition, operators should engage more with product houses on retail training and staff incentive programmes; and reduce the number of stock keeping units staff are trained in – it’s unrealistic to expect them to remember the details of 20-plus products.

Representing the Global Destination Forum, Sharon Kolkka from Gwinganna spoke about the possibility of destination spa operators – often viewed as the keepers of wellness wisdom – forming an online alliance to educate consumers about wellness approaches in spas and their many benefits.

Finally, Peninsula Hot Spring’s Charles Davidson for the Global Hot Springs Forum, suggested that the sub-sector could create a hot spring logo that could be used “beyond language and culture” to identify and create awareness of real hot spring facilities worldwide. He also called for operators to come together to help establish hot springs in developing nations.