Staff motivation and retention can be tough: do you give commissions?
FA: We do, on treatments and retail and fitness sales also. Our fitness manager is an amazing Sri Lankan gentleman; he has created an amazing points system, if you sell this amount you get this percentage etc and this has been working tremendously —we’ve tripled our fitness. Hosts know their commission percentage will increase depending on the sales.
MT: We don’t in this property. Marriott took over just a couple of month ago so it’s something that is in the pipeline but probably not until 2010. It is something that I want to do.
AA: We do – we give more for fitness than spa actually.
MM: We do. One of the challenges I had was trying to defend these incentive programmes to hotel managers. They say ‘why do you need to give them incentives when a food attendant doesn’t get incentives’. It’s different! You can’t compare therapists [to waiters].
FA: That’s not actually true because I was an F&B manager for quite some time and I used to give incentives on wine sales and, as a result, wine sales increased tremendously.
MM: That’s great — that’s what many people don’t understand. If you give an incentive, it’s meant to boost performance.
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FA: We’re working with immigrants; that is something we cannot forget. We are all immigrants and I think 99% of an immigrant’s focus is money; to send money home and improve the life of the family home. It’s not that they’re going to work better for the commission, but they’ll be happier because they can get more money to send to their family.
MM: I succeeded [in securing a commission structure] but it was a bit of a struggle to make [the management] realise that first of all it is an industry standard, if you don’t have it, it will
be hard for you to retain your staff. Plus there is a purpose for incentives; you want them to be happier, you want to motivate them, you want them to push business. It has to be a win-win situation.
FA: A lot of the work we do is sales and all sales people get incentives. If a sales person of a hotel gets incentives for their sales, why shouldn’t the person who is selling products and treatments? But I have to say, being on the other side before that, it is very difficult to sit on a table with directors of all departments when one department gets commissions and no other department does. As a GM it is a very tough thing to get a group of directors together and say they are different, because F&B will say ‘I sell food’. A person comes in for an ice cream and goes out eating caviar — I sold it. It’s easy to say GMs are tough and they don’t understand you, but GMs are in a very tough position also. Like I said to my GM before, why does the therapist get commission and I have a waiter that doesn’t get commission.
What are your spa trend predictions for 2010?
FA: I don’t predict a very big growth but I predict a growth. We’ll be in our fourth year so it wont be in the 100% again but we are predicting growth. One of the things we noticed in 2009 that had an enormous growth, basically tripled, is fitness. We went from having 49 people a day average in January to 130 people a day now.
So we are investing a lot more in fitness, yoga classes, pilates classes, spinning classes. I have a waiting list on my spinning classes and we have them four times a week and are going to increase to five times a week and add them in the morning too — before work fitness.
MM: According to SpaFinder’s 2010 trends list, 2010 is the year of the hammam and that’s a very good trend for the year.
FA: The hammam was actually our number four sales in 2009.
AA: A lot of people are asking about it.
FA: It is at the same time the toughest one to sell; all the GCC people that go for a hammam know what a hammam should be.
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MM: You have to try to be as authentic as possible but at the same time you have to give it a bit of character. In The Palace — The Old Town the layout in itself is not what you see exactly in a Turkish hammam, but the feel is there. What we offer is with a twist of course, gentler but with the same effect, you are exfoliated and cleansed and steamed and brand spanking new when you go out.
FA: One other thing that we’ve noticed and it’s going to be one of the things that we are focused on for 2010 is the wellness aspect and we have hired a wellness coordinator. We are working together with the Six Senses Destination Spa in Thailand because they have the best of the best as far as practitioners are concerned. We are going to do a detox programme that our destination spa does.
There is an interest there; it’s going to grow.
We have three areas of growth in 2010 — fitness, wellness and corporate wellness. So we are offering specific things for companies, like spending a few hours in the office, doing fitness counselling.
MM: I think you have a very good opportunity to do this because of your set up. In our set up, people are there either for business or they’re
there to relax and indulge but I think this is an area that definitely can be developed. At The Palace, we’ve started in the restaurant offering organic corners. I’m even coming up with an organic massage oil with our signature scent.
AA: There is the possibility of having a healthy restaurant linking with the health club at Ramada Ajman.
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