There is one segment of the UK regional hotel market that led total revenue per available room growth in 2025. Not upper-upscale. Not boutique. Not serviced apartments.
Golf and spa hotels.
According to Knight Frank’s full-year 2025 hotel trading review, published in February 2026, regional Golf and Spa hotels finished the year as TRevPAR leaders at +4.2% annual growth — ahead of every other regional segment. The picture had been even clearer mid-year: Knight Frank’s Q3 2025 dashboard, published in November 2025, showed Golf and Spa as the only regional segment recording GOPPAR growth year-to-date as of September, finishing 1.1% ahead of 2024. That combination of revenue leadership and profit resilience tells you something significant about the direction of travel in UK hotel performance.
For hotel owners and operators weighing up whether to invest in spa facilities, wanting to understand essential spa design requirements, or how to make an existing spa work harder, this article sets out the financial case clearly: what the data shows, how spa revenue actually works, and what a realistic return on investment looks like for a UK property.
What makes spa hotels outperform right now
The Golf and Spa segment’s advantage in 2025 did not come from room rates. It came from ancillary revenue. Knight Frank’s data shows that leisure revenue per available room grew 8.0% year-on-year in the year to September 2025, and sat 39% above 2019 levels. Golf revenue grew almost 12%. Room revenue, by contrast, grew 3.0%. The outperformance is being driven by what guests spend beyond the room.
This is the core logic of spa investment in a hotel context: a well-designed spa does not just generate its own revenue. It changes the total revenue profile of the property. Guests who book for wellness purposes tend to spend more, stay longer, and book further in advance than rate-driven leisure guests.
Global benchmarking data from RLA Global and HotStats, covering approximately 11,000 hotels worldwide and published in late 2025, puts figures on the gap. Hotels categorised as having major wellness programmes delivered total revenue per occupied room of USD 561 in the first half of 2025. Hotels with only minor wellness features recorded USD 335. That 67% premium in total guest spending reflects not just spa revenue itself, but the wider halo effect on food and beverage, longer average stays, and the profile of guest the property attracts.
At the luxury end specifically, the same dataset shows hotels with major wellness programmes delivering approximately 3% higher ADR and 4% stronger GOPPAR than comparable properties without. These are global averages and cannot be presented as UK-specific guarantees, but the direction is consistent with what Knight Frank’s UK data shows at segment level.
How spa revenue actually works: the metrics that matter
Many hotel owners underestimate spa revenue because they think of it only as treatment income. A properly managed hotel spa generates across several distinct streams.
Spa revenue as a share of total hotel revenue.
CBRE’s 2024 analysis of 297 US hotels with managed spas (the most authoritative published dataset for this metric, using 2024 data) shows spa accounting for 3.4% of total hotel revenue overall, rising to 4.2% at luxury properties. Revenue per available room averaged USD 6,061 annually. No UK-specific equivalent dataset is publicly available, but the structural logic translates: a 50-bedroom country house hotel generating £5m in annual revenue could expect a mature, well-run spa to contribute £170,000-£210,000 in direct spa revenue at comparable ratios.
Capture rate.
This measures what percentage of hotel guests use the spa. The Global Wellness Summit’s Spa Profitability Handbook (the most authoritative published source for this benchmark, dating from 2020) records capture rates at 5-8% for city hotels, 10-18% for urban resorts, and 20-35% at beach and destination properties. A country house hotel with a quality destination spa, well-integrated into the room package and booking journey, should target the 15-20% range. Every percentage point of capture rate improvement translates directly to revenue.
Treatment room utilisation.
The industry standard benchmark is 35-40% utilisation across available treatment hours. Below 30% and the operation is inefficient. Above 50% and you are likely turning away demand. This metric, more than any other, tells you whether your spa is operationally well-managed.
TRevPAR – (Total Revenue Per Available Room)
TRevPAR is the metric that captures the full economic contribution of a spa to the hotel. It is the number Knight Frank uses to measure Golf and Spa hotel performance, and it is where the advantage is clearest: £313 TRevPAR for Regional UK Golf and Spa hotels in Q3 2025, versus £155 for Upper Upscale hotels in the same period.
The practical implication is that a hotel evaluating spa investment should not model it as a standalone business case in isolation. The correct frame is: what does a quality spa do to the total revenue and profit profile of the property? Once that question is answered, the next is operational: what makes a hotel spa actually deliver against its potential once it is built.
What UK operators’ own financials show
Private sector performance data from UK operators with significant wellness offerings is consistent, even where spa revenue is not broken out separately.
David Lloyd Leisure, the UK’s largest health club operator with more than 150 clubs including 31 spa retreats, reported revenue of £860.7m and pre-tax profit of £32.2m in FY2024, a turnaround from a £25.7m loss the previous year. Membership growth and premium spa investment were cited as key drivers.
The Bannatyne Group, which operates 67 clubs with 44 spas across three hotel properties, reported revenue of £149.7m and pre-tax profit of £14.4m in FY2024, a 40% increase year-on-year. EBITDA reached £43.6m with 219,500 members.
Exclusive Collection, the owner of Pennyhill Park, The Vineyard and other country house properties, explicitly attributed revenue growth in its most recent filed accounts to golf and spa memberships.
None of these operators discloses spa-specific financials separately. But the pattern is consistent: properties and groups with meaningful wellness infrastructure are growing profitability faster than those without.
What private capital is signalling
Investor behaviour is often a more reliable signal of long-term commercial fundamentals than operating data alone. On that basis, the case for wellness-led hotel assets is clear.
In the first half of 2025, Alchemy Partners made a strategic investment in Barons Eden, the operator of Hoar Cross Hall in Staffordshire and Eden Hall in Nottinghamshire — both country house hotel spa properties described in trade coverage as two of the largest spa resorts in Europe. Barons Eden attracted more than 180,000 spa guests in 2024 and reported pre-tax profit growth from £0.9m to £1.3m. Following the Alchemy investment, Barons Eden acquired two further country house properties to expand its spa portfolio.
Blackstone’s acquisition of Village Hotels from KSL Capital in June 2024 for approximately £850m brought 33 hotels and 132,000 local fitness members onto one of the world’s largest real estate balance sheets. Village’s model is club-membership-led rather than spa-led, but the thesis is the same: recurring wellness revenue from local members, independent of hotel occupancy, is a structurally attractive revenue stream.
UK hotel investment totalled approximately £5bn in 2025 (Savills, January 2026). Christie and Co’s annual Business Outlook noted explicitly that the transactions market saw strong interest in “experiential, immersive and wellness-led leisure assets” from high-net-worth buyers and family offices.
The wellness tourism tailwind
The UK wellness economy is valued at USD 261bn in 2024 by the Global Wellness Institute, ranking the country fifth globally. UK wellness tourism specifically was worth USD 15.6bn in 2022 and has been growing at 78.7% per year since 2020, the fastest post-pandemic recovery of any major market.
International wellness tourists spend an average of 41% more per trip than typical international travellers, according to GWI’s most recent data (2022 figures, updated from the widely cited but now dated 53% figure from 2017 research). Domestic wellness tourists spend even more relative to standard domestic travellers. This spending differential is not theoretical. It shows up in RevPAR, TRevPAR and food and beverage revenue at properties that attract this audience deliberately.
The UK also leads the world on hotel membership fees per available room, at USD 13.5 PAR and growing at 10.2% year-on-year, according to the 2025 Wellness Real Estate Report from RLA Global and HotStats. This reflects the maturity of the UK’s health club and country house spa membership model, and suggests there is an established and receptive local market for well-designed wellness memberships attached to hotel properties.
What a realistic ROI looks like
There is no single published UK benchmark for spa investment payback period. Operators and consultancies who discuss this publicly typically cite ranges of 4-7 years for meaningful spa additions, though compact, high-utilisation amenities (thermal suite, sauna and cold plunge, small treatment room suite) can achieve payback in 18-36 months according to Luxe Wellness Spaces’ wellness ROI framework.
Several factors govern how quickly a hotel spa investment pays back:
Existing ownership of the land and building.
A hotel that already owns its estate and employs a management team has near-zero additional fixed cost for a modest spa addition. The incremental revenue from treatments, day passes and membership is almost entirely margin. Greenfield spa operators face site acquisition, planning and infrastructure costs that hotel spa investments often avoid.
Membership model.
A local membership programme attached to the spa provides predictable recurring revenue independent of hotel occupancy. For regional UK properties where weekday occupancy is typically lower than weekend, this is particularly valuable.
Day visitor access.
Opening the spa to non-residents on a day access basis adds revenue in capacity that would otherwise be idle. The risk is brand dilution if not managed carefully, but the financial contribution can be material.
Package integration.
Spa and accommodation packages with a minimum night requirement fill both the room and the treatment diary simultaneously. Properties that bundle spa access with room bookings typically report higher average booking values and greater advance booking lead times.
Quality of design and facility offer.
This is where the investment decision is made or lost. An undersized changing room, a thermal suite that cannot maintain temperature, a pool hall with inadequate ventilation, a treatment room layout that creates operational bottlenecks: these are the reasons hotel spas underperform against their potential. The design brief for a hotel spa is fundamentally different from a day spa or a gym, and the specialist knowledge required to get it right is not interchangeable.
Making the case internally
For hotel owners making the case to a board, investor or lender, the most defensible framework combines three elements.
First, property-specific capture rate modelling: how many room nights does the hotel currently sell, what is a realistic capture rate, and what does that translate to in treatment revenue and day pass sales at current market pricing?
Second, ancillary revenue uplift: using the Knight Frank TRevPAR premium as a directional benchmark, what increase in total guest spend does a quality spa produce, and how does that translate to GOPPAR over a five-year horizon?
Third, membership revenue: at what membership fee, and with how many members, does the recurring revenue from local memberships cover the operating cost of the spa?
None of these calculations requires specialist data. They require a clear understanding of your property’s guest profile, local market, and the capital cost of the spa you are proposing to build.
That is where an experienced design consultancy earns its place. Not just in producing the drawings, but in helping the operator understand what scale and specification of spa makes commercial sense for their specific property, in a market they know well, before a single pound is committed to construction.
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