“Are you using data just to promote your own
agenda, or are you just collecting the facts that
are going to support your position? That can be
one of the big challenges.”
— angela kies, spa manager, aquavie spa @ Westgate hotel
marketing methods work best to what treatments to
include on the menu.
seeing the future
Angela Kies, spa manager at AquaVie Spa @ Westgate
Hotel, has a crystal ball—really, a spreadsheet—that she
uses to anticipate what the recently opened spa will see
booked in the next week. “As a new spa, we didn’t have a
lot of historical data, but I wanted to find out what our
needs were,” says Kies, “and I wanted to find out what
was going on with last-minute bookings.” The spa,
located inside a four-story fitness center adjoining San
Diego’s Westgate Hotel, was seeing a large number of
last-minute bookings, and Kies wanted a way to predict
which treatments would be booked last-minute for each
coming week. At the start of a week, Kies “tallies up the
numbers of every type of service already on the books.”
At the end of the week, she looks up every service
performed that week that wasn’t on that initial list. Over
many weeks of repeating this process, this method
allowed Kies to begin to anticipate what bookings she
could expect in the following week.
The spreadsheet also has the variable cost for
providing each service, and Kies says that she can use the
spreadsheet to automatically calculate what will likely
happen to last-minute bookings if she changes prices or
adjusts their costs.
analytical retailing
aquavie's forecasting tool allows it to better know what services will be
booked for the upcoming week.
Carefully tracking retail data can empower a spa operator
to make bold choices in their retail space, too. Teri
SEPtEmbEr
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