Summary

A spa property had key goals around revenue generation and cost reduction. At the time, they had a five-figure budget for error absorption and guest issue resolution.

Background

A luxury spa had recently opened and had begun to grow its business, but still had major operational challenges that cost its profit margin and created a hectic, challenging environment for its front office team. They were seeking build more consistency, more infrastructure, and better support for their team to address these concerns.

Challenge

There were many moving parts in the organization, with various teams able to book and update services. There was inconsistent tracking and follow up due to the chaotic nature of the front desk environment. This often led to inconsistent guest experiences, expectations and missed details that resulted in unhappy guest interactions. When these issues arose, the team felt intimidated and unequipped to resolve the issues thoughtfully and creatively-especially when the error was made internally. Instead, the regular default was to offer significant (>25%) discounts on their services, and not infrequent complete comping of the services entirely. This led to significant missed revenue opportunities and high cost of services, since the labor requires compensation no matter the outcome.

Solution

With a large property with many guests (over 120 appointments per day across 20+ treatment rooms), we identified all charges that went to the house account, and further categorized them into various buckets such as avoidable charges, team error, and miscommunications. From there, we identified the root cause of these charges and built systems to reduce the rate of comped services. To do so, we employed a few methods:

• Developed an issue escalation and resolution policy so that our team had guardrails to offer discounts, tools to support guest issue resolution, and ensured manager approval for more significant compensation packages.

• Identified opportunities in our booking software to proactively address common issues. For example, sending an appointment reminder that highlights therapist gender preference (given that this was one of the frequent issues this property experienced).

• Integrated specific language in the booking process to ensure guest expectations were clear around cancellation and service change policy and arrival times, so that there was no question of the result when these situations arose.

• Created a daily 5-minute checklist to identify common schedule errors (e.g. double booking, missed appointment cancellations, etc.), proactively address them, and observe any new trends arising that can be addressed.

• Implemented thoughtful service knowledge training for the front desk team to support their consultation with guests about treatments, so they had clear expectations around the service and ensured alignment with their target outcomes. Training went beyond service descriptions, to include specific elements, recommendations and explanation of how to discuss the service with a guest to achieve their desired goals.

With this project, we were able to identify up to 60% savings addressed through these changes.

“We don’t know how we would have made it without Annie’s support and guidance. We wish we could keep her forever!” —Luxury spa leadership