Abi Selby
Abi Selby, founder of Spabreaks
Boringdon Hall hotel & Spa, Devon
Celtic Manor Resort, Wales
Slieve Donnard Resort and Spa, County Down
South Lodge Hotel and Spa, Sussex
Entrepreneur Abi Selby is founder of Spabreaks.com, a booking site for the spa industry. Here she discusses bringing diversity and inclusion to spas, surviving furlough, and what’s next for her business.
Just before Abi Selby took her A Levels, she was told she needed to “go and find a nice man with a big bank balance”, because she wasn't ever going to achieve anything. “I failed most of my exams, and I was bottom of the class in pretty much everything,” she says. “I've got no business background and my parents weren't entrepreneurs or business people. So I had to learn very quickly.” Today she runs a highly successful spa business, that not only survived during the pandemic, but thrived.
Selby is founder of Spabreaks.com – Europe's largest spa break booking agent. Essentially, it acts as the equivalent of a travel agent for spas and hotels in the UK and Ireland, selling them, promoting them, booking customers into them, and acting as a middleman between the spa and the customer. “We’re known as innovators in the industry, and during the last 14 years have really worked to break down barriers in the spa industry. We've made it much less about beauty and much more about wellbeing generally: mental health, body confidence, escapism, reconnecting all the important things that I personally feel spa brings to the world.”
The former sales manager originally envisioned the idea back in 2004, while working for a collection of hotels in Berkshire. Since that time, the Brighton-based company has grown from a team of two people, with 26 spas on their books, to a team of 90, working with over 750 spas, and sending between seven and 10,000 people off to be pampered every week. “We just seem to manage to go from strength to strength every year.”
Part of that success has come down to the company’s willingness to evolve; when they first started, it was a call centre model. Fast-forward to 2021, and 82% of everything booked so far this year has been online. “It's all about seamless connectivity”, she says. Another driver has been her passion for inclusion: “When I launched the business 14 years ago, I had a real issue with the fact that spa was intrinsically linked to beauty. For me, a spa is not about nails – it's about how we feel.”
And certainly as mental health has become a much more relevant part of everybody's lives, being able to make spas more accessible to people with disabilities or cancer – “people who’ve felt completely alienated from spas” – has been crucial to her. “Our founding mission was to make spas more accessible, and that's really stood us in good stead: over a million people a month come to the website – quite an incredible reach. And, I hope, testament to the fact that we’ve really tried to make it as inclusive as we possibly can.”
There is so much work to be done within the spa industry around diversity, she says, including attracting more men into spas – and people of colour, under-represented in spa promotion. Meanwhile, “all the models in spa imagery are size eight, or 23-year-olds, who look incredible. Quite frankly, that's not in any way shape, or form relatable, nor helping our industry become more accessible. So we do most of work at the moment around diversity and inclusion inclusivity through YouTube and our social media to make sure spas have plus-size robes in their lockers, for instance. These conversations are incredibly important and need to be discussed.”
She talks about how daunting it was a woman and working mum to embark on entrepreneurism: “You feel you've constantly got to prove yourself… these incredible women who work for massive brands can make you feel like you can have it all. And actually, in reality, unless you've got a lot of money to have a fleet of people helping you raise your family, it's really not that easy. So surrounding yourself with people who feel like they're part of that journey is incredibly important. Also understanding, I think, as a working mum, that you can't have it all!” As a mum of three herself, she’s keen to encourage flexible working for new mothers, ensuring women “feel like they have a path and route back to their careers once they've had children.”
Naturally, for a spa business, the pandemic proved problematic to say the least: “Overnight, I watched my entire business be on its knees and that didn't stop for six months”. Instead, during Lockdown, she focused on making sure the website was as good as it could possibly be, while keeping the phones open. Among other measures, they created a new section of the site for promoting hotel bedrooms, and promoted gift vouchers with a long validity. Nevertheless, from going from a quarter of a million in year one to £26m with £30m forecasted for last year to “literally almost being annihilated overnight”, really took it out of the home-schooler. “I felt completely overwhelmed.”
Yet she and her team hung on with a Blitz spirit, via everything from socials, regular pub quizzes, and personal WhatsApp calls every Sunday. “Communication was key… And now we’ve all come together, bigger, stronger, better, bolder, and braver in many regards.” Point of fact, they achieved more sales last May than ever before: “We're very much alive and kicking! The industry is definitely back, the demand is definitely back. But I still feel like we've got a little bit to go before we're kind of out of the woods, so to speak.”
She thinks it's too early to tell how much the spa industry has changed as a result of the pandemic. “I'd like to think that we have realized our value more. I'd like to think that people now realize the absolute value of the power of touch and the power of reconnecting and escapism and all the things that spas offer. So I really hope that we as an industry appreciate ourselves a bit more, and realize that our therapists are incredibly valuable people. They deliver the most wonderful service to people who really, truly need it.”
Of course, they also have to win back customer confidence, she says, of the challenges surrounding the past 18 months. “A spa by its very nature is a very intimate experience. It's a experiential, wonderful thing, but you’re also sitting in a sauna next to somebody you don't know. As an industry we need to very gently win back the confidence of our customers. And we'll do that through customer service, we'll do that through communication, we'll do that through cleanliness and hygiene and making sure that our hotels and our spas are as clean as they can possibly be.”
Spabreaks is looking into European expansion and are currently expanding their Irish portfolio: “The Irish spas are incredible. They have a huge amount of treatment rooms, with beautiful facilities. And obviously Ireland itself is incredible with the seaweed link and the sea.”
Increasing the website is another big focus, and generally continuing the online shift. “I'm also working heavily in the cancer space with Sue Harmsworth and the SATCC, which is a new body set up to ensure that nobody ever gets turned away from a spa if they've got cancer. And I'd like to create a Collection for Women with menopause because that's another kind of big thing for me in my mid-40s. So yeah, there's a lot a lot going on!”