We noticed our clients were attempting to do yield management manually by adjusting prices at select times to fill empty reservations and because many thousands of spas use SpaBooker as their master calendar, client management system, and POS, we realised we could leverage their historical sales details to create an effective yield management tool.

We launched Deal Maker in November. It’s an automated system that fills off-peak appointments by identifying slow times on a client’s calendar, creating special offers and promoting them across the web.

How are you responding to tech trends?
Internet Retailer predicts mobile internet usage will surpass desktop by 2014, so spa consumers will increasingly be using their phones to handle more tasks like booking services and purchasing products.
SpaBooker offers mobile booking directly from a spa’s website or Facebook page and our clients experienced a 230 per cent increase in mobile bookings between October 2011 and July 2012.

The mobile impact doesn’t stop on the consumer side. We believe mobile spa management will grow and we expect innovation will take mobile use into many more aspects of a spa’s operation.

What’s your vision?
To become the most widely used and loved management and marketing platform serving health, wellness and service businesses.

Our clients will be the best run in the market, because they’ll benefit from efficiencies and marketing capabilities made possible by our software. SpaBooker will help clients grow, drive profit and, importantly, do what they do best – serve their customers.

We’ve continued our tradition of pioneering new technology, with the most robust set of mobile features on the market. These are available on both iOS and Android smart phones and tablets. Managers are using SpaBooker Mobile to monitor their businesses, schedule appointments and even process credit cards right on a smartphone or tablet.

What types and size of spas are your products targeted at?
Spas of all sizes and types. SpaBooker is flexible enough to serve the entire industry and designed to scale with businesses as they grow. Our clients run 4,000 spas in 70 countries and our software is available in eight languages.

What makes it different or better?
Our quarterly software releases allow clients to stay current with technology and marketing innovations. As a unified, web-based system, our online features, like eCommerce and online booking, integrate seamlessly with spa operations. SpaBooker also provides front desk staff with both customer and business management tools, as well as fully integrated POS.

Unlike installed software, SpaBooker is accessible from anywhere, anytime, including via smartphone and tablet. This reduces IT maintenance costs, since all information is stored securely in the cloud.

What’s the price range?
SpaBooker is available for all spa types, so prices depend on
size and need. For small to medium sized spas, monthly fees range from US$65-US$250 (€48–€185, £41-£160), plus a one-time set-up fee. We also have enterprise pricing for multi-location businesses that require API access for custom solution development and system integrations.

What else would you like to share with our readers?
Last November we changed our company name from GramercyOne to Booker to align with our focus on helping service businesses such as spas to run and grow successfully. We’re also proud to have doubled the size of our spa client base in the last 12 months.

We’ve completely rewritten Millennium and the result is Evo. It’s more visually appealing and intuitive for the user, more simple to use and touch-friendly.

It incorporates patented technology and we expect it to be out in June. It will be in the cloud as an option, so clients won’t have to buy servers. We’ve also added some new features, including marketing functionality that helps streamline the front desk.

How are you responding to tech trends?
The PC – that big clunky thing on the desk – is disappearing. Now it’s all about mobility: wireless, tablets, cloud, online and touch. We’re moving away from a spa needing servers with a load of IT people to support it, and onto cloud-based software.

It’s about having options. Some people still want installed software, which we’re great at, but others want low upfront costs and to be wireless.

What’s your vision?
To create a tool operators can rely on that will help grow their business. My focus is on how we can simplify and beautify our software and continue to build business intelligence into it. I believe employee motivation’s vital too. This is part of Evo, as it enables them to set and track goals without having to wait for their manager to give them a report.

Which spas are your products suited to?
Our software works at all scales, from the smallest spas and yoga studios to the biggest spas in the world. Whatever the size, we want to help them with utilisation of resources. Spas we currently supply include Depasquale Spa and 1,000 Massage Envy spas.

How’s your software different or better?
The answer to this is how we’ve built it. Over 25 years we’ve learned a lot about the business intelligence which spas need to grow, so we’ve built our software around growth indicators like client retention, frequency of visit, new clients per month and average spend. We also provide 400 reports through the system, allowing users to fully evaluate every aspect of their salon or spa operation.

What’s the price range?
Monthly fees range from US$69-US$189 (€51-€140, £44-£121) in the US. This includes updates, support and use of the software.

What else is happening at Millennium?
We’re trebling in size over the next four years, going from 75 people to 200 and we’ve just purchased a 45,000sq ft building in New Jersey to accommodate this. Evo is multi-lingual and multi-currency, so international expansion will be quite large also.

Our annual Experience conference will be held in Arizona in June, offering classes on Millennium, business building, accounting, tax and other topics.

Our customers are often spas within resorts and we eliminate the silos of information stored in a plethora of systems relating to guest spend in the spa, restaurant, shops and other activities guests may have participated in during their stay. Instead, we provide a single, integrated view of guest spend, experience and preferences.

How are you responding to tech trends?
Key transformers are social networking, customer interaction solutions and yield measurement. These are about capturing and sharing information easily and so everyone gets value.

Solutions that anticipate these requirements and deliver meaningful analysis will be the winners, regardless of which hardware devices are currently in vogue. We’re regarded as a strategic asset by our clients. In our history we’ve lost only one customer.

What are your strengths?
We excel at dealing with customers who want to build long-term relationships with their guests and ourselves. They might be based in Singapore, but need the comfort of knowing we can support them in other locations and across multiple sites and time zones with full tax, language and cultural compliance and that we understand the nuances of these markets.

What makes your software better?
The ability to integrate with other systems and functionality – whether it’s corporate finance, going cashless or having a spa activity stay wrapped up into a single bill at check-out.

What’s the price range?
We’re often a replacement solution where another system has failed and are often selected by the operator because of our depth. Upwards £10,000 (US$6,430 €7,400) is where we’re most relevant.

Our investment in innovation is enabling exciting new user experiences and allowing our customers to take advantage of rapidly emerging technologies such as mobile to manage in very powerful and cost-efficient ways

How are you responding to tech trends?
We’re big believers in mobile and tablet and we’ve released check-in apps and a portal for staff to check schedules from mobile devices. These are part of our new ResortSuite OPS/operations framework.

We also see spa membership-based business models and social media as exciting opportunities for spas to engage with consumers and create deeper, more sustainable customer relationships.

What’s your vision? 
Historically, the hospitality industry hasn’t invested in integrated solutions and has ‘dealt with it’ through many manual processes on the back end to ensure guests don’t experience inefficiencies.  

With guests’ desire to self-direct their experience, this approach no longer works. ResortSuite is one of the companies helping to redefine the guest experience by empowering guests.

What makes you different?
For spas that are part of another business like a hotel, integration creates a smooth guest experience across all touch points – front desk, phone, web and mobile. Our investments in mobile have amplified the value of our guest-centric design and our system speed and reliability are valued by clients.

Which spas should use ResortSuite?
There are four markets where our products have strength and fit: destination spas, where we help operators achieve a seamless guest experience; hotel/resort spas where we integrate better with hotel systems than other spa software-only providers; large or high-volume spas where our Oracle-based technology provides the scalability, reliability and speed to manage high volumes of customers and; multi-location day spas, where centralised, real-time information such as guest and staff profiles are managed. Our enterprise dashboard with 75 KPIs provides a real-time pulse across all locations.

What’s the price range?
We’re not the cheapest, nor the most expensive. Our technology drives profit with its mobile reservations and integrated marketing (often a third party add-on). Multi-site operations will find the cost lower, but we may be beyond the budget of small spas.

Our software’s well established and functionality-rich so we tend to add new apps, rather than feature functionality 

For example, we’re going green, with the aim of enabling customers to go paperless. We’re doing this via mobile applications that enable guests to check-in, complete health questionnaires, sign digitally and pay online.

This improves the guest experience, while saving on printing. In addition, capturing this data digitally also means full reporting is available.

We’ve also been enhancing our third-party interfaces, so we now have additional hook-ups to loyalty and CRM systems, as well as more PMS solutions and gift card options.

Version 2 of our Concept Business Intelligence product has been launched, with a new user interface and branding. It’s available to download from the Appstore. We’ve added income simulation tools to this product, as well as a number of forecasting features.

How are you responding to tech trends?
We have a few mobile apps out already, but we’ll be introducing more through 2013 that will make spas more efficient and improve the user experience. For example, we’re increasingly used for booking and paying online, so on the web side, emphasis will be placed on customer loyalty and social-media integration.

Our customers have always wanted to be different from the competition, as a result, our new solutions will be 100 per cent tailored to their needs and will be white-labelled just for them.

Tell us about your vision?
We’re focusing on expansion. We’ve been in the industry 20 years and will continue investing in new products and markets: we love the challenge of doing business globally and we’re aiming to reach the point where we have clients in 70 countries in the next 12 months.

We’re also excited by the upcoming new release of our Concept software. It’s under wraps but we can’t wait for our clients to try it.

How’s your software better?
Our software offers high-end resorts a full solution. Besides the standard feature functionality, we aim to be global, multi-language and multi-currency. We also have fiscal compliance and a local presence in 60 plus countries.

Our system is scaleable and robust. It’s based on an Oracle database and interfaces with a number of other systems, including Opera and a range of accounting packages. Besides spa, it can control leisure, activities, golf and membership transactions, as well as having CRM, web booking and mobile functionality. And if clients want another feature we don’t currently have, we’ll build it for them.

What’s the price range?
It’s scaleable – anywhere from US$3,000-US$50,000 (€2,230–€37,000, £1,900–£32,000 ). We offer finance packages, so the cost of the system can be wrapped up in the operational budget rather than having to be carried as a capital expense.