OPINION T
he 2002 Bal i bombing was devastating to us – within three
days everyone had leſt the island and hotels went down to 3 per cent occupancy. It took Mandara Spa about a year to recover and we lost us$1m (€781,000, £645,300). T ere’s no rule book on how to react to
JEFF MATTHEWS President and COO, Mandara Spa
this situation. People say they advertise more, embrace staff and create incentives, but I’m not convinced they do this in reality. We cer- tainly didn’t create any special deals because there wasn’t anyone to off er them to! Our first action was to save costs. We
trimmed back on expenses and cut about 20 per cent of our employees: those who hadn’t been performing. Where we could, we sent staff oversees – it was a cost to get them there, but once they were there, they were off our books and generating money again. As we were able to diversify, we weath-
ered the storm well and although we didn’t make money we broke even and no one’s going to complain about that faced with the
situation we were in. Apart from the 2005 bombing in Kuta (which was no where near as bad) our business has gone from strength to strength in Bali, as well as in Asia and around the world. We didn’t have any procedures in place
on how to handle the bombing because we just didn’t think it would happen to us. And we faced the same scenario when we were hit by the tsunami in 2004 when nine of our employees lost their lives and fi ve of our spas in T ailand and the Maldives were com- pletely destroyed. T is time, our main priority was to take
care of the employees’ families who rely on the money their children send home. When our other spas [worldwide] heard about what had happened, we received an incredible us$35,000 (€27,350, £22,600)
There’s no rule book on how to react to a crisis. People say they advertise more, embrace staff and create incentives, but I’m not convinced they do this in reality
T
he major fl oods in Thailand last year [from July to December]
CRISIS CONTROL
worth of donations. I was proud to tell this story to the press and that’s how we turned the negative into a positive. From Bali, I also learned to be more forth- coming with the media by
openly explaining what had happened rather than just saying ‘no comment’. If you’re a well-known brand, then you’ll
be judged on how you react. Yet as these are freak occurrences, it’s impossible to plan for them. But from our experience we know what to do. Firstly, it’s not to panic and to also ensure that the people who are in leadership roles, such as spa managers, have the ability to keep a level head and to make important decisions. Secondly, it’s to make sure your people
are safe. To give employees an extra sense of security we might follow the example of other companies which aſt er the 2002 bomb, fl ew their employees to Singapore so they spent a week in the real world to show they weren’t in danger. T irdly, it’s not to completely shut down
the business because there are things you can do to diversify your costs.
Mandara Spa, the Balinese-themed spa brand, is a subsidiary of Steiner Leisure Ltd. Today, there are 80 Mandara Spas world- wide. Details:
www.mandaraspa.com
WIPAWADEE SIRIMONGKOLKASEM
covered around six million hectares (14 million acres) and caused around thb1.4bn (us$44m, €35m, £29m) worth of damage. Devarana is the signature spa brand for
Managing director, Devarana Spa We normally run a yearly marketing plan
Dusit International which has 14 hotels in T ailand. Although none of the Dusit hotels were directly hit, the properties in Bangkok and Hua Hin suff ered the most in terms of revenue. T ey experienced huge cancella- tions from international guests and most occupancy came from T ai residents made homeless from the fl oods who received a spe- cial rate. Normally half of our spa customers are hotel/resort guests, so the drop in hotel occupancy had a big impact – in November our business dropped by 50 per cent. Yet as Devarana has been operating in
Thailand since 2000 and Dusit has been present since 1948, we have a good con- nection with the local community and this helped our spa business a lot.
in our spas that’s based around seasonal treatments. We decided to stick to this plan during the crisis rather than run discount promotions as we believe special rates are not the main factor when in comes to pur- chasing decisions. On the other hand, we felt that running hard discounts would aff ect our pricing strategy in the long run. Dusit took this same stance when it
launched a media campaign ‘Reemerged, Renewed and Return’ to encourage visitors to return to T ailand. And any campaign that’s expected to help the hotel, will hope- fully benefi t our spas in the long-run too. The month-long campaign which ran
throughout December offered guests a food and beverage credit valued at 50 per cent of the room rates, but wasn’t a direct
74 Read Spa Business online
spabusiness.com / digital
discount. It was communi- cated via press releases and online and got exposure in major publications such as the T e International Herald Tribune [the global edition of the New York Times] as
well as on
TravelDailyNews.com and
FT.com. Dusit also reached 221,000 recipients via a direct marketing email blast. Overall, Devarana has seen a positive
impact on our business since the second half of December and it was even better in the fi rst week of January. And, of course, part of this was directly related to hotel occupancy. T e Asian market should come back just in time for the Chinese New Year on 23 Janu- ary but I expect it will take longer to recover business from Europe and the US.
Devarana Spa was created as a luxury T ai-in- spired spa chain for select fi ve-star hotels within the Dusit portfolio. It currently has four facil- ities open in T ailand, one in the Philippines and another is due to launch in the Maldives in 2012. Details:
www.devaranaspa.com
SPA BUSINESS 1 2012 ©Cybertrek 2012
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