Grim Basements and Humiliating Underwear—Let's Admit Hotel Spas (Mostly) Suck
Aah, the spa. Don’t we all love that fragrant corner of the luxury hotel, that tranquil haven where the tensions of a working life melt away in an enchanting world of exotic unguents and seraphic smiles?
Not me—I don’t love spas. They make me nervous. Believe it or not—and I realize how perverse, how ornery, how cantankerous this makes me sound—I tend to come out of a spa with a greater level of stress than when I went in.
I’ve done it all in my time—the oil drip in Dharamsala, marma in Mauritius, Tibetan singing bowls in Tulum. So I know what spas are meant to do. They are meant to make you go all gooey. They are meant to sink you gently into a deep well of blissed-out serenity. The trouble is that in my case they usually have the opposite effect.
Before we go any further, and before masseurs and masseuses all over the world throw up their sinewy hands in horror, I’d like to make clear that this diatribe doesn’t apply to the kind of small Central European town where you might go to “take the waters” and are forced to chew every mouthful 50 times. See, I have always fancied myself as the world-weary Dirk Bogarde figure in a white robe at some down-at-heel fin de siècle bathhouse reeking of sulphur, with muscly Teutons to pummel me into submission. I also have no quibble with traditional Thai massage, Finnish saunas, and other culturally sanctioned practices which at least have their feet on the ground of common sense.
No, I’m talking about hotel spas—the ones with the wind chimes and the overpriced organic wellness products by Earthwise, Geneviève de Courcy, and Ritual Origins. (I made those up.) The ones that are shoved away in a basement where you can practically hear the conversation at the planning meeting when some executive from the Big Hotel Chain says “shit, what about the spa?”
I am of course aware that, as in any other service industry, hotel spas run the gamut of quality and that many of their clients have only positive things to say about them. It’s my considered opinion, however, that, for the most part, they suck.
I happen to know whereof I speak. I am a travel writer specializing in the upper end of the market, so assignments involving a stay in a five-star hotel are the (Poilâne) bread and (Isigny) butter of my trade. It follows that mooching around in spas is something I do quite regularly. When the PR person suggests I “experience” one of the hotel’s signature spa treatments—say, an anti-aging yogic cleanse with “gua sha” tools and tangy citrus scrub, or maybe a pearl-infused remineralizing body mask—I’m professionally obliged to take up the invitation. Though I’ll usually aim for the late-afternoon slot—that way at least I can cheer myself up over dinner afterwards.
Glumly I change into my white fluffy robe and pad down the corridor in the pair of strange white slippers I found in the wardrobe, hoping I won’t have to share the lift.
Down in the basement, the lady behind the spa reception desk interrupts her Facebook update to give me the big smile. Serving me some sort of “welcome” beverage—it might be a livid green seaweed and wheatgrass pressé—she ushers me into a windowless cubicle described on the website as a “treatment room.”
Then comes the moment that cannot be put off any longer: the full disclosure. My (clean) boxer shorts are not thought appropriate attire for the detoxifying, deep-cleansing, deep-probing treatment I have signed up for. Instead I’m required to wear a disposable paper garment consisting of two skimpy panels, front and back. (Which way round? The decision is yours.) Like the back-less hospital gown, this “thong thing” offers no refuge for one’s natural modesty and seems designed purely to humiliate the wearer. Better to go butt naked and cross some weird ethical line, surely, than to suffer the panties from hell.
So now here I am, lying face down on the massage table, my head resting in the towel-lined porthole with its view of the floor. Divested of my fluffy bathrobe I feel oddly vulnerable, like a patient on an operating table.
The masseuse arrives and there is some desultory chat. She turns out to be a young woman from a nearby village that was once a hardscrabble farming community before the building of this international resort where the rooms cost $1,000 a night. What a difference between the working life of her forebears—bent over in the paddy field—and her own—bent over rich white folks’ supine bodies. Through my porthole I watch her perfectly pedicured feet moving around the table in rubber sandals as she preps the massage. Small sounds reach my ears. Soft cellphone clicks as she looks out her favorite “relaxing Zen music with water sounds” playlist on Spotify. The squelch of an oily liquid squeezed from a bottle.
She gets to work on my scalp and neck, moving down to my back, my lower back… hey, that’s a bit too low for comfort. A line from a John Donne poem bubbles up in my fevered brain: “Licence my roving hands, and let them go/Before, behind, between, above, below.” Hope she doesn’t notice the appalling state of my toenails, in contrast to the immaculately shellacked ones I can see poking out of her crocs. I wonder: would this experience be less awkward if the masseur were a man? Or would it be more so—especially if the skimpy disposable panties made my growing embarrassment impossible to hide?
I feel restless, sticky, and cross. Time to turn over: OK, at least this means I’m half-way through.
Etymology, as so often, has something to say about how we got to this point. Spa, the word, comes from the name of a town in eastern Belgium where, in the 17th century, illnesses caused by iron deficiency were treated with chalybeate (ferruginous or iron-bearing) water. By 1960 the word’s original sense of “medicinal or mineral spring” had evolved into “a commercial establishment offering health and beauty treatments.” Current use has hollowed out the term even further, so that (according to Webster’s) “spa” can now mean something as prosaic as “fashionable resort” or “hot tub with a whirlpool device.”
Wellness, the neologism bandied about by all hotel spas nowadays, also needs a little unpacking. Born out of the hippy/New Age movement, the word went overground in the mid-1970s when John W. Travis opened his Wellness Resource Center in Mill Valley, Calif. Since then it has gradually migrated towards the high-net-worth end of things, becoming an accessory that can be acquired easily enough if you have the money, just like the latest Prada bag. When (in her Netflix TV series Pretend it’s a City) Fran Lebowitz swiveled her gimlet stare onto wellness, she skewered it in masterful style. ‘It is like extra health. Wellness is a greediness. It’s not enough to not be sick, I have to be well. Wellness is something you have to buy. There is special food: teas, seeds, juices, smoothies… All things people are looking for in wellness, I wouldn’t want them. No, thank you,” she pronounced.
But my problem with the hotel spa is less about woolly words and more about the generally flimsy and unconvincing nature of the product itself. My Protestant upbringing may be at fault here, but I cringe at the strained, artificial intimacy of the treatment room. It seems to me ironic that in a world where personal space is rigorously policed (and rightly so) we are asked to take this sudden invasion, as it were, lying down. Isn’t there something odd, too, about two total strangers engaged in wordless bodily contact for an hour and there not being a shred of eroticism about the encounter? Hell, even most bouts of actual sex don’t last that long.
A lifelong claustrophobe, I find the body wraps—these involve you being slathered with mud, crushed grapes, seaweed or chocolate, covered with Saran wrap and left to stew in your own juice—among the trickiest spa moments of all. The minutes that pass between the masseuse telling you “I’ll be back shortly” and her return seem to stretch out into an existential void as you lie there trapped like a sausage in its skin, wishing there was some way to shut up the plinky-plonky music.
Ah yes, the music. Years of close observation have led me to identify various types of spa-based background music including what I call the “Rivendell” type (floaty flutes and tinkling harps) and “Asian Chill” (often featuring a twangy sitar or wordless Chinese melody). Another common variant is “Ambient Piano Noodling.” All of it is larded with thick layers of echo, because that says “relaxation,” “mind-expansion,” and elevated spiritual states. Birds twitter in the upper regions of the mix. Who actually makes this stuff? Have human beings had a hand in its creation, or is there an AI program that churns out endless “relaxing” soundtracks for hotel spas? Would silence not in fact be more genuinely relaxing, or is the muzak there to distract from the grunts and groans, the slap and slither of hands on flesh? To my mind a bit of Gregorian chant, some Hildegard von Bingen, even a Chopin nocturne, would be preferable. But I’m not sure the masseuse would have these on her playlist.
So here’s my message for all you Big Hotel Chains: time to wake up and smell the hibiscus tea. Some of us don’t find your spa experiences a “holistic spiritual rejuvenation that de-stresses, detoxifies and relaxes”—we were just too shy to say so.
Personally, if I’m ever going to find the hotel spa a place of enjoyment, there are a few changes I’m going to need. First, I could do with a bit less of the New Age dogma, the nebulous buzzwords, and the outlandish claims. Also, I’m done with basements: I want natural light flooding in and gorgeous views through the treatment room windows—a forest glade, desert dunes, a Mediterranean seascape. Cut the aural wallpaper, and let’s have a little Mozart, a little light Vivaldi, a Bach sonata for solo violin. A glass of champagne would be nice. And please God, no more of the paper panties.
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