Hotel and resort spas

A resident spa is judged twice: once as a spa, and once as part of the property it sits inside. A guest does not arrive from the street. They arrive from a room upstairs or from a lounger, wearing a robe that came from somewhere, having booked through somebody who very likely does not work for you.

Which means half of the experience has happened before the spa is involved at all. The booking taken at the desk, the time offered, the directions given, whether anybody mentioned the spa in the first place — a resident spa is very often the best-kept secret in its own building, and the reservation that never happened is the one nobody counts.

And afterwards the guest walks back into the hotel. Whatever state the spa returned them to is the state the hotel receives them in, and the two halves of the property rarely speak to each other about it.

• Hotel and resort spas that fill on a Saturday and stand quiet on a Wednesday.
• Spa managers who report into a hotel and are measured on revenue rather than on the visit.
• Properties where the spa is sold at the front desk by people who have never had a treatment in it.

• How your spa was offered, booked and explained by the property around it.
• What the arrival was like for a guest who came down in a robe rather than in from the street.
• How the visit ended, and what state the hotel got its guest back in.
• What a guest remembered of it three days on, set against everything else the stay contained.