Licensing and certification

Launching into the roundtable discussion, Antoniouk raised the issue of spa licensing from Dubai Health Authority (DHA), a subject that was touched upon at last year’s Spa and Wellness Forum, and something she feels there is still very little clarification around.

Antoniouk comments that the process is lengthy and requires a lot of approvals, and that renewals need to be done every two years. The other experts agreed, with Bonner claiming that it’s extremely costly, and Spencer adding that there have recently been some changes to the licensing requirements.

Story continues below
Advertisement

Hawco suggests that having a governing body to offer clarification and help guide spas through the process would be useful, while some of the experts claim that creative recruitment can help get around some of these issues.

Here's what our experts said

Beverly Spencer: “The examination has changed considerably from before it’s a lot more based on anatomy and physiology. It’s a lot more complex and my question is: ‘does it need to be so intense for a massage therapist?’”

Ghassan Amer: “[The authorities] came to us and we said ‘this is a spa, we don’t offer any medical treatments, it’s pure relaxation massage spa and then said we don’t have any laser machines and they said ‘oh that’s fine’. They never came back.”

Aoibheanna Bonner: “We don’t know if we need to hire people with qualifications or not. Are we going to have a day when they come and close down the spa because people don’t have qualifications?”

PAUL HAWCO: “What we’ve done is we’ve created wellness-based treatments around oils, muds, physiotherapy stuff and we’ve picked an expert team to perform those treatments so we’re putting it into the ‘wellness box’. And we’re selecting that expert team of therapists that can speak really good English, that can do consultations, that can do these types of treatments, and we’ll register them.”

Article continues on next page ...