Guest blog: how to make your spa accessible to all
Helena Grzesk, director of spa at The Spa at The Midland in Manchester, which won Professional Beauty’s Residential Spa of the Year: 10 Rooms of Fewer 2017 Award, reveals how you can accommodate all types of guests in your spa.
At The Spa at The Midland, we welcome all guests and recognise the need to be inclusive. We accommodate for the needs of men and women of all ages, and ensure our spaces are accessible for less abled guests and those seeking recovery.
Also, our restaurant menus cater for all diets, including vegan and gluten-free, and the spa has been designed using gender neutral colours.
You need to diversify your treatment menu
We have also made our spa more welcoming by diversifying our treatment menu. We’ve recently introduced our Wellness for Cancer spa experience,which supports people during and post-cancer treatment. The idea is to help reduce the client’s stress and anxiety, while nurturing and nourishing them.
We trained with Wellness for Cancer, a non-profit educational foundation that provides cancer therapy training to spas and wellness facilities. The organisation has specifically trained and certified our spa to provide services for guests who have experienced or who are currently living with cancer.
Make your clients aware of changes
We are the first spa in the Manchester area to initiate a Wellness for Cancer experience and once officially certified, we collaborated with local cancer support groups and charities inviting them to experience the treatments. It was a great way to make clients aware that we offer a fully rounded menu.
Our spa mission is a simple one – to enhance the experience and lives of our guests.
Start making changes today
Making your spa more inclusive takes time and money, so I would recommend making changes a step at a time. Three simple changes you could make in your spa are:
- Speak to staff and guests about how they think you can improve the current experience.
- Review your accessibility space and invest in ramps, larger doorways and automatic doors for the elderly and less abled.
- Train your staff for specific needs, such as pregnancy and recovery, and introduce new treatments that would benefit these clients.
Image: ©The Spa at the Midland