The post-pandemic surge in wellness spending has been well documented, and the hospitality industry's response — investment in spa infrastructure, wellness programming and mindfulness-adjacent amenities — was predictable and, in many cases, commercially justified. What the UK Spa Association's 2025 annual benchmarking report confirms is that the investment made through 2021 to 2023, when hotel refurbishment cycles were flush with deferred capex and consumer appetite for wellness was rising sharply, is now delivering returns that exceed initial projections.
Spa revenue per available hotel room — the metric the UKSA uses to track the category's contribution to total hotel economics — grew by 19% across the 280 UK hotel spas participating in the benchmarking programme in 2025, compared to 11% growth in 2024. Food and beverage ancillary revenue grew by 9% over the same period, a solid performance but one that has been outpaced by spa for two consecutive years.
The divergence reflects both the strength of demand — advance treatment bookings at the best-performing spas are running four to six weeks out — and a structural advantage that spa revenue has over F&B in the current cost environment: treatment revenue is not subject to the same food cost, labour-intensity and waste pressures that have compressed F&B margins in recent years, and a spa treatment booked and prepaid has a near-zero no-show rate compared to restaurant covers.
Where the Performance Is Strongest
The UKSA data segments performance by hotel type, and the findings are consistent with the broader leisure hotel trend: rural and countryside hotels with spa facilities are significantly outperforming their urban counterparts on spa revenue per room, driven by the guest profile — typically leisure travellers who have specifically chosen a property for its spa offer — and the longer average length of stay that allows multiple treatment bookings within a single visit.
The top quartile of performing hotel spas in the UKSA benchmarking programme achieved spa revenue equivalent to 28% of room revenue in 2025. For these properties, the spa is not a secondary amenity but a primary commercial driver that influences booking decisions and justifies rate premiums that would be difficult to sustain on the room offer alone.
The bottom quartile — predominantly urban hotel spas with lower dwell times, less wellness-motivated guest profiles and in some cases facilities that were added as amenities rather than genuine commercial investments — achieved spa revenue equivalent to approximately 6% of room revenue. The gap between these two groups has widened year-on-year since 2022.
Investment Requirements
The capital cost of building or upgrading spa infrastructure remains significant — a credible standalone spa for a luxury or upper-upscale hotel typically requires between £1.5 million and £4 million depending on scale — and the payback period, even at the top of the performance range, runs to several years. The operators now achieving the strongest spa returns are those who made those investments three or four years ago, when the consumer appetite for wellness was beginning its ascent and competition for well-capitalised properties was lower.
For hotels now considering spa investment for the first time, the competitive landscape is more complex. The supply of quality hotel spa product has grown significantly in the regions where demand is strongest — the Cotswolds, the Lake District, the spa towns of Hampshire and Yorkshire — and a new entrant needs to offer something genuinely differentiated, in terms of treatment programme, physical design or brand identity, to compete effectively.
The UKSA's benchmarking report is available to member properties. The association's annual spa summit, where the full data is presented and discussed, takes place in September in Birmingham.