SpaUK – an association for British spas – has launched a new online benchmarking programme enabling members to compare their key performance indicators (KPIs) against the rest of the market.

The tool, created by hospitality software specialist Sofality, took six months to develop and compares businesses across four key categories: average treatment revenue per hour; retail sales as a percentage of treatment revenue; percentage of therapist utilisation; percentage of treatment room utilisation.

It was officially launched on 23 February at the Spa & Wellness Conference in London and is currently available to all SpaUK members, although the organisation is considering opening the platform up to non-members as well.

Businesses input their four KPIs once a month and can then filter the database (which is anonymous) to compare by type of spa (destination, day or hotel), region and number of treatment rooms (less than 10, or more than).

So far 40 SpaUK members have added their details to the database – which is stored securely on an independent server at Sofality HQ – with a further 60 in the process of doing so.

According to Sofality director Richard Perris, the programme was born out of a business need rather than an idea.

“Lots of spa directors have crossed over from the hotel sector, where there is an abundance of information to aid decision making,” Perris told Spa Opportunities.

“They were frustrated by lack of this data in the spa industry and decided to do something about it. SpaUK held a CEO Forum at the 2012 Spa Life conference, where they agreed on the KPIs and from there work began on the software.”

The project was fully funded by SpaUK, although the organisation is reluctant to reveal the exact cost.

It says the database will become increasingly useful in assessing the market as time progresses, with plans to provide statistics showing year-on-year movement of the KPIs against the set benchmark once there is 12 months’ worth of data.

“To get the benchmarking off the ground, we have kept it as simple as possible,” says SpaUK vice chair for benchmarking & market intelligence Alex de Carvalho.

“Data is only entered once a month, across the four KPIs. Once the system is fully embedded, we have the possibility moving to a daily input, which would enable spas to compare performance also by day of week.”