The pamper industry

Eric Jackson
Editor at Global Trader magazine
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Post date: Friday, 6th January 2012

From being a niche market, the business of hotel spas has grown into a multibillion dollar industry that has people from San Francisco to Singapore hooked. Eric Jackson delves into the trade and raves about his personal favourite.

When Manchester United superstar George Best was caught by a hotel worker with a naked Miss World on a bed covered in bank notes, the porter apparently said to him: “George, where did it all go wrong?”

It provided George with chat-show ammunition for years, but the story – true or not – illustrates how money, sex-appeal and glamour are linked to in the trillion dollar hotel industry.

And nowhere are those elements more evident than in the spa hotel market, which is to the ordinary hotel market what Sex And The City is to EastEnders. The rich and famous swear by them, providing them with that irresistible mix of pampering and health-improvement so they can stay stick-thin (as long as not too many cocktails are consumed in the posh bars).

Madonna, for instance, is known to be a massive fan of the Agua Spa at the uber trendy Sanderson Hotel in London. It offers everything from facials and reflexology to shiatsu, reiki, Thai bodywork and massage, and her personal favourite is the Dr Hauschka organic range of skin care, based on aromatherapy principles.

But you don’t need to have dosh (although it helps) and fame to enjoy spas. According to a report by Euromonitor International there are about 150 million active spa goers worldwide, with a huge increase in Asian countries. The industry is worth more than $250bn globally and the UK market alone is worth over $1.7bn.

And now there’s even an annual Global Spa Summit, which this year took place in Bali in May. Jan Freitag, Vice President of Global Development, Smith Travel Research, says: “Luxury hotel development in Asia will continue to heat up. And it’s safe to assume that the vast majority of these hotels will include spa and work-out related facilities, as these have moved from ‘optional’ to de facto standard amenities.”

While new spa hotels are sprouting up in all corners of the world, though, my personal favourite remains the very old school Gellert Hotel and Spa in the Hungarian capital of Budapest.

You probably won’t see it featured in any glossy guides these days – years of communist rule and lack of money have seen restricted investment, so it’s not on the trendy radar – but this grand, magnificent building on the shores of the Danube has played host to heads of European royalty, along with the likes of American president Richard Nixon, the King of Nepal, the Dalai Lama, Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Jane Fonda, Pablo Casals and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Juliana, Queen of the Netherlands also spent her honeymoon there.

Now that’s class, rather than new money. My wife and I stayed at the hotel in July, to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, and we wanted somewhere special – that wouldn’t break the bank – to mark the occasion.

Natural springs

And even though we paid extra for a special room overlooking the Danube, it still only cost us £150 a night for bed and breakfast in accommodation that Oscar Wilde or Lord Bryon would have felt comfortable in. What’s more, the spa actually uses mineral-rich spa water that bubbles up from natural springs inside the Gellert Hill on which the hotel stands.

Started in 1911 but interrupted by the first world war, the Art Nouveau style hotel was finally opened in September 1918 and has stood as a symbol of Budapest ever since. When the four-storey hotel opened it had only 176 rooms. All suites had bathrooms with the supply of both mineral and thermal waters, and the hotel quickly became a hub for high society, attracting dukes, duchesses, maharajas poets, writers, musicians and aristocrats. The outdoor wave pool was built in 1927 and in the same year 60 new rooms were added to the hotel. The wave pool – one of the first in the world – still works with the original machinery.

The thermal pool – with a constant temperature in the mid-thirties - was opened in 1934 and a sauna has since been added.

Together, along with elaborate terraces, sun decks and neo-classical alcoves, it forms an area that looks more like a Hollywood set from the thirties than a hotel.

You can almost imagine the Busby Berkeley girls performing their formation routines there. But it’s the two inside pools and all the associated treatment rooms that comprise the most spectacular feature of the hotel, with sky-high ceilings and oceans of marble with design that would cost billions today. There is even a retractable roof for when the fine weather comes.

On our visit, though, the weather was unseasonably cold, which made going in the outside thermal pool even more pleasurable. The most amazing thing was that hardly anyone else ventured outside. Like kids in a playground, we couldn’t resist flitting from inside to outside and back again, for a good two hours, when really we should have been enjoying the delights of the rest of Budapest. We did the same thing the following day.

Now the Gellert has 234 rooms of which 13 are suites, 38 are superior doubles, 94 standard doubles, 49 singles with baths, and 40 singles with showers.

Most health spa treatments are available such as balneotherapy, mechanotherapy, electrotherapy and mud treatments, and the hotel has a complex physiotherapy department and inhalatorium.

This article was first published in Global Trader Magazine, Issue 2. To read the entire publication, click the ebook.

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