to spa or not to spa?

[Epona Willow]

Hi all,

I am currently working from home as a holistic massage practitioner.

I am toying with the idea of doing some spa work for a few reasons, mainly to get me out the house and working in another enviroment where I dont have to worry about getting clients. It might also be good to improve on my timings.

I have avoided the spa world as I dont think its me. Though I cant knock it till I have tried it sulrey. I studied holistic massage and body work and not spa/beauty therapy. I am healing centred and my sessions are very client orientated and spa sessions are not though I've only been once. In and out with not much communication?

I was wondering if I am would be wasiting my time persuing this for a while and also wondering if anyone knows the going rate? I charge £35 for an hours session so probably looking at a major cut there but perhaps I might gain some good experience.

Please could you share any thoughts or experiences if you have a few moments.


Thanks very much

 

[jmau]

Hi Lollo

There are some positive aspects about working in a Spa - you get to meet other therapists, you don't have to book your own clients in; you may get to use the facilities and get staff discounts on items sold in the spa shop.

I would say the negatives are - you earn less per treatment, and depending on which spa you are working at you can work back to back for quite long hours, which is tiring.

I don't know the going rate now as it was a few years ago when I last worked in the spa environment.

Luv Binah
x

 

[joshrules001]

Hi Lollo

Certainly good to work in a spa if you want to improve your timing for therapies. They tend to stick to rigid timetables. As Binah said, you could end up working back to back and it can be quite tiring.

On the plus side, you would have a regular wage and also clients booked in for you.

On the downside, most spas only pay the minimum wage on starting and even after a while, not much more. If you have been used to getting £35 per hour for your treatments, I think it would be difficult to work for someone else for may 5/6 hours to achieve this sum.

I work for myself and wouldn't consider working in a salon/spa but it has taken a while to build up a client base. You could maybe consider working a few days in the spa for experience whilst building up your own client base.

Hope this helps

E x

 

[mueiouvliahinyepk]

Hi Lollo,

I have worked in a hotel spa and it was great for experience. So many clients, all ages, all builds. It is different though as most clients see it as a pampering experience but still I had quite a few who had particular problems they wanted me to concentrate on. Even though I was warned somedays that my next client wasn't very nice, I had no problem with any of them so I can only presume it was the way the previous therapist had treated them. It can be fast & furious. A full body massage is 55 minutes and then you have 5 minutes to sort your room out before the next one. On a busy day working 10.30 -6pm I could have 9 treatments to do - all massage! full body, half body, back massage combined with a salt scrub. And the wages are poor. But, I am actually glad I did it. It was a good learning curve.

 

[SOURABH]

I worked in a spa for 3 months by myself recently, well they called it a spa, but it was basically 6 rooms for massage with some changing rooms and some products for sale.

I did between 6 and 10 massages a day, and as the tables weren't adjustable did some damage to my left wrist im still waiting to heal, but its getting better.

Your right in that you get a huge collection of different customers from the obese to the very thin, up sides are the experience, down sides are you only get to form a relationship with them if they a) speak your language (which 70% of my customers didn't) or b)come back because they have a particular ailment such as a stiff neck or something similar or a bad back.

i trained one member of the staff who would succeed me, either im a genius or customers are unaware of what massage actually is in a spa, because after 8 hrs of training (due to my number of clients) she started to massage and the customers left happy, I could tell the difference watching her, but none of the clients could.

In my experience spas pay you at about a 5th of what you earn for them, roughly if you earn them 5000, they will pay you a 1000 I may just have had a bad experience, but the prefered option for me in the future would be to pay to rent a room in a hotel and work for myself, in fact if I could afford the rents I would work for myself.

Personally id prefer to work from home, not an option for me at the minute or be a mobile therapist, which im going to be considering soon!

Im not belitelling spa work or working in a hotel gym or something like that, but to give good massages in my opinion 5 is the maximum in a day and not all full bodies, the 2nd member of staff who entered my spa at about months 1 week , stated a full body would be a maximum of 50 minutes and in my experience I agree, the 60 minute massages I was doing were not only boring, but a big strain on your positive energy towards the client and were only there to justify what my employer wanted to charge

 

[Hazel]

sorry about your wrist. sending you some healing!!

thanks for sharing your thoughts and good luck going mobile or finding something that better suits you.