The Fairmont-Raffles company and The Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group (MOHG) have signed up for a pilot initiative aimed at establishing a benchmarking scheme for spas.

The initiative is being developed by Jan Freitag, vice-president of global development for the US-based company Smith Travel Research.

It has the backing of Andrew Gibson, group director of spa for MOHG, and Anne McCall Wilson, vice president of spas for Fairmont-Raffles.

Smith Travel Research is initially asking US spa companies to submit 18 months’ worth of three key metrics, based on those commonly used in hotel benchmarking – namely, rooms available, rooms sold and rooms revenue. These are then used to calculate occupancy, average daily rate (ADR) and the revenue per available room (RevPAR).

The metrics will be translated as treatment room hours available, treatment room hours used and total revenue generated by treatments.

Freitag said: “Using just these three numbers, we can then come up with a selection of very interesting metrics.”

While the pilot will only focus on US spas, Freitag is hopeful that the scheme will be ready for a global rollout by 2009.