01 Research
Numbers we defend in board decks
Industry benchmarks, regression notes, sourced projections. Always cited.
Resources · In-progress library
Field notes on the SPA P&L.
An in-progress library of research, operator playbooks and architecture notes for GMs, directors of wellness and revenue managers. Each piece is built from the same model we use to size pilot deployments — so the numbers you read here are the ones we defend in your next board meeting.
2026 · Q1
Capture Rate
The capture-rate obsession — why every other SPA metric flows from it.
Industry data we have reviewed — STR, Hotstats, Resort & Spa Pulse — shows the share of in-house guests who book at least one treatment explains the bulk of between-property revenue variance. RevPATH, no-show curves, lifetime value, repeat rate: largely downstream of that one number. This is the long-form argument for treating capture rate as the single executive KPI, and the modelling framework we use with pilot properties.
What you will take from it
- A one-page modelling worksheet — plug in your own room nights and ADR
- A definition of capture rate that does not break when you switch PMS
- The four operator levers that move the number, ranked by effort vs. lift
Library map
Four shelves, one decision tree.
We organise everything we publish into four working tracks. Start where your next board question lives — the rest cross-links from there.
02 Operations
Playbooks our partners actually run
Therapist utilisation, midweek shadows, no-show recovery. Field-tested patterns.
03 Architecture
Why the system is shaped the way it is
Single-tenant BOX model, triple-resource validation, GDPR posture. Engineer-grade.
04 Playbooks
Operator briefings, ten minutes each
QR placement, multi-language conversion, charge-to-room. Short, replicable.
Library · 9 in progress
Every piece, every shelf.
Research
The 9 PM problem: why ~40% of SPA bookings happen after the front desk closes.
What after-hours booking telemetry tells us about the silent abandonment of the phone-only workflow — and the modelled revenue at risk.
Modelled $52K–$140K/yr revenue recovery per 80-room property
Operations
Therapist utilisation, not bookings: the metric your COO should be reading.
Why filling 70%+ of treatment-room hours matters more than your gross booking count — and how a least-gap algorithm closes the dead 15-minute windows.
Worksheet: convert booking count to therapist-hour utilisation in 10 minutes
Playbook
QR card placement: a one-day field test, four properties.
Bedside vs. desk vs. hallway. What guest-behaviour research and our own pilot installations suggest about where the QR actually has to live.
Placement checklist + projected capture-rate lift per location
Architecture
The BOX model: why each property runs on its own dedicated cloud.
The architectural argument for single-tenant SPA infrastructure. Why GDPR posture, brand sovereignty and competitive isolation all point the same way.
Decision matrix: multi-tenant SaaS vs. dedicated-cloud BOX, by property class
Research
Charge-to-room economics: modelling the friction tax on every booking.
Payment-friction research synthesised across hospitality conversion studies. What removing the card-entry step is projected to do to your booking funnel.
Per-booking friction model — plug in your ADR to see modelled lift
Operations
The Tuesday-afternoon utilisation gap, and how to fill it.
Resort SPAs share a quiet midweek-afternoon shadow. A pricing-and-availability protocol that, in our modelling, materially lifts that hour.
Dynamic-pricing protocol, defensible to revenue committee
Playbook
Multi-language booking: when localisation actually moves conversion.
GCC and DACH localisation patterns, broken down. What conversion research suggests about language-first booking flows for international guests.
Localisation scoring — which markets justify the translation work
Research
RevPATH benchmarks: the European 5-star distribution.
Industry cross-section synthesis. What "good" looks like, where the outliers come from, and why the bottom quartile is closer than most operators think.
Quartile-positioning worksheet for your next board pack
Architecture
Triple resource validation: how we made double-bookings architecturally impossible.
A walk through the transactional booking primitive — therapist, room, equipment — race-condition-protected by design.
Reference architecture sketch + the race-condition test suite
Skip the research
Or just have us model your property.
If you would rather see the numbers run on your own room count, ADR and SPA layout, that is a 25-minute call. We model capture-rate lift, utilisation gain and projected revenue side-by-side — same framework as the research, your inputs.