US spas earn 4.5x more per location than UK spas, new TRYBE benchmarking report finds
The State of Spa Revenue: Global Benchmarks draws on operational data from 400+ spa, leisure and activity businesses, and finds that the best performers win on intentional design, not size or price.
TRYBE, the spa, leisure and activity operational platform, today published The State of Spa Revenue: Global Benchmarks for 2026. The report benchmarks revenue, pricing, guest behaviour and Revenue Per Available Treatment Hour (RevPATH) across the UK, Europe and the United States, using real operational data from more than 400 businesses.
The headline finding is that the industry needs to stop asking "is the diary full?" and start asking how much each hour is worth.
Same industry, very different outcomes
On the surface, spas in the UK, Europe and the US sell much the same thing: massage, body treatments, facials and wellness experiences. Financially, they could hardly be further apart.
The performance gap is not down to one factor but to several working at once. American spas in the dataset serve more guests per year, compared to Europe and the UK. Those guests also spend more, 21% per visit compared with the UK. Add higher treatment prices and stronger use of treatment hours, and the advantage compounds.
Pricing is where the difference is most visible. A 60-minute treatment on average in the US is 59% higher than the UK, and at 90 minutes, it is 27%. Yet price alone does not explain the picture. Europe charges less than the UK at every treatment length, but earns more per guest and nearly three times more per location. According to the report, utilisation and packaging, not price, are doing the heavy lifting.
Bigger isn't better
The report's most counterintuitive finding challenges a long-held assumption in hospitality: that scale brings efficiency. Measured by RevPATH, it does not.
In the UK, the smallest operators earn more than twice as much per available treatment hour as the largest. In Europe, mid-size operators perform best, posting some of the highest figures in the dataset, while the largest groups fall far behind. The report links the drop to complexity: more rooms, more therapists and more diary gaps to manage, often without systems built to handle them.
A new kind of guest
The guests' driving spend have also changed. Those aged 25 to 44 are now the highest-spending segment, treating wellness as part of a routine rather than an occasional treat. The 55-plus group, long the industry's core market, now spends the least, and male bookings grew 255% between 2024 and 2025.
These guests book on their own terms. More than half of bookings (51%) are made outside office hours and 76% on a smartphone or tablet. Monday brings the most bookings, but Saturday brings the highest spend. They also favour simplicity: 93% of bookings through TRYBE are packages, and well-placed upsells in the booking journey average £266.
"For years the spa industry has measured success by how full the diary is. That question is running out of road," said Amy Moore, Marketing & Partnership Lead at TRYBE. "Labour costs are rising and margins are under pressure, so growth has to come from the value of each hour, not the number of appointments. The operators at the top of our benchmarks aren't the biggest or the most expensive. They're the most intentional: they design their days around demand, lead with packages and treat their booking data as a live strategic tool."
What the top performers do differently
Across every market, the operators at the top of the benchmarks share one trait, and it isn't size, location or price point. It is intentionality. They make packages the default offer rather than an option buried in the booking flow, and build upsells into the online journey instead of relying on front-of-house teams to sell them.
They also treat the diary as a revenue tool, not just a schedule. That means protecting peak periods for high-margin services and using quieter windows with targeted offers rather than blanket discounts. Dynamic pricing remains rare even in the US, where only 18% of spas use automated dynamic pricing, so the report sees room for operators in every market to manage demand more smartly.
Finally, top performers measure the right things. They track RevPATH alongside occupancy, monitor upsell conversion as well as treatment volume, and use their booking data to make decisions in real time, not just to review last month's totals.
The State of Spa Revenue: Global Benchmarks for 2026 is available now here. Operators who want to compare their own RevPATH, pricing and treatment mix against the benchmarks can contact the TRYBE team.
