Investors are looking for an “institutionalised system” when it comes to spas, according to Omer Isvan, president of international investment consultancy Servotel.

Isvan spoke at a session at the Global Wellness Summit in Tyrol, Austria last week, and said while many hotel operators don’t understand wellness well enough, they recognise that it is a trend – and an element they should have in their properties.

“Spas have brought a new segmentation into the hotel, changed the average length of stay and spend of a person, and secured repeat customers,” said Isvan. “I’ve seen hotels very often carried by a loss-making spa, and if I took that spa out of the hotel, the hotel would collapse.”

Isvan said investors are looking for “more than just a spa that delivers the feel-good factor” – they’ve recognised the growing consumer need for integrative wellness/medicine and transformational experiences, and are ready and waiting to put money into integrative wellness destinations.

“(Investors) have the cash – we have the intent,” he said. “There’s no shortage of land, labour and capital to put it together. But we have a shortage of know how.

“There’s a depth of knowledge [about wellness operations] in this room but no one has packaged this up into a pill that an investor can swallow,” he continued. “In the hospitality industry, you can buy a ‘hotel management package’ from the likes of Hilton. There’s a huge supermarket where you can buy brands, management, distribution, marketing and sales, recognition and PR. But this has not happened with integrative medicine and wellness and that’s where the big gap is today.”

Isvan said that scaleable integrative wellness is where the money is, and that he hopes for an ethos that can be transported from country to country, adapt itself, and still maintain a set of standards that is recognised by both consumers and investors.

“It has happened with spas, but not with integrative wellness,” he said. “The investment is there, the capital is there, the desire is there….(But) we as an industry have not been able to replicate and create a scalable version of integrative wellness. This is our new challenge.”

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