The UK Spa Association Networking event took place last week at the Westminster Lodge Leisure Centre in St Albans, where Alex De Carvalho – vice chair of the association in charge of market intelligence – encouraged more spas to sign up to benchmarking to make the data as robust as possible.

In 18 months, the UK Spa Association has grown its membership from 24 to 135. These members represent 380 spas. Carvalho detailed a three-year plan to grow the association’s following to 250 members by the end of 2015, a total of 400 by the end of 2016 and 600 in 2017.

“We have 80 spas regularly submitting information on four KPIs that are used to create benchmarking data, and in February another 48 spas will join that number,” said Carvalho.

The extra 48 spas are members of the Hand Picked Hotels collection, De Vere hotels and Imagine Spas.

“By April 2015, we hope to be able to allow spas participating in the benchmarking system to select specific spas to benchmark themselves against,” said Carvalho. “We want to get spas putting data into the system more regularly, providing daily and weekly performance information. It is also our aim to break down spa revenue by type of treatment, to see which spas are doing which treatments well.”

“We will only be able to analyse regional data correlations once a significant number of spas sign up to the system and start to input their data,” said Carvalho.

The UK Spa Association’s AGM is expected to take place on 13 March 2015. Another networking event is planned for 26 August 2015 and there is potential for small regional events too, according to Carvalho.

The next monthly webinar, hosted by the association, is scheduled for 2 February and will be about how to create a great staff experience.