A spa or wellness program earns what its treatment rooms, thermal facilities and staff can deliver in a day, and nothing more. Underwriting that starts from square footage or revenue per hotel room can look reasonable on paper and still promise more treatments than the building or the team can provide. The defensible approach starts from capacity, hour by hour, and prices each revenue stream against its own ceiling.
The stakes are rising with the market. Wellness has become a core part of how hotels, resorts and branded residences are designed, financed and sold, and the wellness program now carries a larger share of the projected revenue and of the value lenders are asked to support.
Wellness has moved from amenity to infrastructure
The Global Wellness Institute values the global wellness economy at $6.8 trillion in 2024, up 7.9% in one year and double its 2013 size. It projects nearly $9.8 trillion by 2029. Within that total, wellness tourism accounts for $893.9 billion, spas for $157.4 billion and thermal and mineral springs for $71.7 billion. Wellness real estate grew fastest over the past five years, at 19.5% a year.
The US spa market set a record in 2025. The International Spa Association's 2026 study, conducted by PwC, reports $23.5 billion in revenue from 191 million visits, an average of $123.10 per visit. Hotel and resort spas earned $181 per visit, against $110 at day spas.
Developers have taken note. Knight Frank's 2026 branded residence survey describes wellness moving from an amenity to core infrastructure, and resort and residential projects increasingly treat thermal facilities and treatment suites as part of the core design. When the wellness program is part of the pitch to buyers and lenders, its revenue projection needs the same scrutiny as the rooms.
Thermal bathing is leading the shift. The Global Wellness Institute's hydrothermal initiative reports that in some markets, bathing and thermal rituals are becoming a primary reason guests choose a hotel. Institute figures cited by Hotel News Resource count 365 new thermal bathing projects opened worldwide between 2020 and 2025, with more than 250 in development. Each of those facilities holds a fixed number of bathers at once, and that number is where the underwriting has to begin.
Each revenue stream has its own ceiling
A treatment room can sell only so many hours. Take a room open ten hours a day, with 60-minute treatments and 15 minutes to reset between guests. It can deliver at most eight treatments a day, or 2,920 a year. At 60% utilization and an assumed $200 average treatment price, that room produces about $350,000 a year. The figures are an illustration, but the structure is the point: revenue comes from rooms, hours, utilization and price, and each of those can be tested.
The other streams run on different limits.
Thermal circuits are limited by how many guests the facilities hold at once and how long a session lasts. A circuit sized for 30 guests with two-and-a-half-hour sessions turns over fewer than five times in a 12-hour day.
Fitness and movement studios are limited by class size and the schedule, and most demand arrives in a few peak hours.
Memberships are capped by peak-hour capacity. Selling more members than the facilities can hold on a Saturday morning erodes the experience that justifies the dues.
Day access from outside guests competes with hotel guests and residents for the same peak hours.
Retail follows treatment volume and rarely stands on its own.
A ratio of revenue per square foot, or per hotel room, averages all of this together. It cannot show which spaces will sell out, which will sit empty, or where a design change would add revenue.
Staffing usually sets the real limit
A treatment room earns nothing without a licensed therapist in it. In ISPA's 2026 study, 61% of US spas reported open positions, an estimated 21,450 service-provider jobs went unfilled, and one in three respondents named staffing as their single biggest challenge.
Demand is growing faster than the workforce. US spa visits rose 1.8% in 2025, while spa employment grew 0.2%, to 376,900. ISPA president Lynne McNees describes spa leaders as "balancing workforce challenges, evolving guest expectations" alongside leadership and technology demands.
That makes scheduled therapist hours a better starting point than room hours. Demand concentrates on weekends, holidays and late afternoons, so a program that cannot staff its peak sells only part of its theoretical capacity. Licensing rules, wage levels and commuting distance in the local labor market decide how many therapists a resort can actually hire and keep, and a remote resort may need staff housing to fill its schedule. Relief on licensing is coming slowly. ISPA and two professional associations were recognized in 2026 for advancing an Esthetics Licensure Compact that would let licensed estheticians work across member states.
Staffing drives cost as well as revenue, so the same assumptions shape both lines. An underwriting that adds treatment rooms without adding the therapists to fill them overstates revenue and understates cost at the same time.
Larger wellness programs earned more revenue and less profit in 2025
Hotel operating data now shows the gap between wellness revenue and wellness profit. The 2026 Wellness Real Estate Report from HotStats and RLA Global, drawn from more than 13,000 hotels, found that hotels with major wellness programs led on total revenue per available room in 2025 and posted the largest occupancy gain, up 1.6 points to 69.4%. Payroll weighed on their results. For the first time, hotels with smaller, targeted wellness offerings beat them on room rate, revenue per available room and gross operating profit per available room, at $99 against $89.
The divergence was sharper in the United States. Profit per available room at US hotels with major wellness programs fell 14.7% in 2025, while hotels with smaller programs increased it by 6.1%. HotStats CEO Michael Grove framed the question for owners as "whether the operating model can convert that revenue into durable profit." RLA Global's group CEO, Roger Allen, said the market is rewarding precise, well-targeted wellness investment over sheer scale.
A capacity-first model answers that question before the program is built. It shows which spaces will pay for their staff and which will not.
A lender or owner should see the model behind the number
A wellness revenue projection holds up when a reviewer can trace it from the floor plan to the total. Four things make that possible.
A stream-by-stream build. Treatment rooms, thermal facilities, studios, memberships, day access and retail, each with its own hours, capacity, utilization and price.
Benchmarks from operating spas. Revenue per visit, visits per location and the split between hotel guests, residents and outside customers, drawn from comparable operating programs rather than design-stage projections.
A sensitivity on utilization and staffing. How revenue and margin move if the program runs at 45% instead of 60%, or opens with two-thirds of its planned therapists.
Operator input where the program calls for it. A specialist operator or consultant can test the treatment menu, staffing plan and ramp-up against what they run elsewhere.
Published benchmarks give that review a starting point, with a caveat. CBRE's analysis of 297 US hotels that operate their own spas, as reported by Alkaline360, puts 2024 spa revenue at $6,061 per available hotel room, or 3.4% of total hotel revenue and 4.2% at luxury properties. HotStats puts US spa treatment revenue at $21.40 per occupied room in 2025. Both are measured per hotel room, not per treatment room or thermal bather, so they can test a projection but cannot replace the capacity build.
The same discipline applies to value. A wellness program that is underwritten hour by hour gives a lender a revenue line it can rely on, and gives buyers of branded residences a clearer picture of what their dues will pay for.
Build the wellness projection from capacity before it reaches the lender
GP Valuation & Advisory Services prepares feasibility studies, capacity and revenue models, and appraisals for resorts, hotels, branded residences and standalone wellness facilities. We model spa and wellness programs as businesses in their own right, stream by stream, and test them against operating benchmarks before the numbers go into a financing package.
If you are planning, financing or acquiring a property with a wellness component, contact us to discuss the assignment. Our October article on branded residence premiums covers how wellness affects residential value, and more on our practice is on our Hospitality & Leisure page.
