Spa Business: The Global Magazine for the Spa and Wellness Industry

Spa Business is a business-to-business magazine for the international spa and wellness industry, published from Hitchin in Hertfordshire by The Leisure Media Company. Launched as a dedicated title in 2003, it was described by its publisher as the first global spa magazine, created to unite a fragmented worldwide sector and give it a shared professional identity. Its readers are the people who own, operate, design, supply and invest in spas — from hotel and resort spa directors and day-spa owners to wellness developers, consultants and product houses.

Two decades on, Spa Business sits at the centre of a small media ecosystem of its own: the flagship magazine, a stream of insider editions, an annual Spa Business Handbook, a daily news website and email and social feeds. In its twentieth-anniversary year the title reported that its team had produced more than 10,000 spa news stories and 2,000 in-depth features, figures that convey both the scale of the modern wellness economy and the magazine's ambition to document it as it happens.

Overview

Spa Business is a trade magazine, not a consumer title. It does not review treatments for holidaymakers; it examines the business behind them — investment, design, operations, staffing, technology, research and strategy. A typical issue combines an editor's letter, industry news, interviews with senior operators, profiles under the 'Spa People' banner, research reports, opinion pieces and sponsored supplier content, all addressed to professionals whose decisions shape spas around the world.

The magazine is published by Leisure Media, a specialist publisher of business magazines for the global leisure industries whose other titles include Health Club Management, Sports Management, Leisure Management and Attractions Management. Spa Business is the company's voice in the spa sector, and its editorial team travels internationally to industry events to interview the operators and thinkers setting the sector's direction.

History and Founding

The roots of Spa Business lie in Leisure Management, the magazine Leisure Media used from its launch in 1980 to cover the whole leisure industry in a single title. Liz Terry, who joined Leisure Media as a junior business reporter in 1983, recalled that spas in those early years meant ancient thermal baths or 'health farms' visited by the wealthy, and that coverage of the sector was one strand among many in a general leisure brief. The plan, she explained, was always to spin off dedicated magazines once individual markets grew large enough to support them.

The spa market reached that point at the start of the twenty-first century. Spa Business was launched in 2003, with Liz Terry as its founding editorial director, with the stated intention of uniting the world of spa and wellness and helping it forge a powerful identity through collaboration. The magazine marked its twentieth birthday in 2023 with a special anniversary issue handed over largely to the sector's thought leaders, and Terry's anniversary history traced how a longstanding commitment to the sector had led to the creation of the dedicated title.

Publisher and Ownership

Spa Business is published by The Leisure Media Co Ltd, based for many years at Portmill House, Portmill Lane, Hitchin, Hertfordshire — the address printed in the company's magazine imprints — and operating under the Leisure Media name from Hitchin. The company, established around 1980-81, publishes a stable of business magazines and websites for professionals in sport, fitness, spa, tourism, hospitality and attractions.

Liz Terry is the company's chief executive and its editorial director, and the central figure in Spa Business's story: she launched the magazine, has shaped its editorial philosophy, and continues to write and interview for it. That continuity of ownership and editorship is unusual in trade publishing and helps explain the title's close, almost familial relationship with the industry it serves — a relationship the anniversary coverage itself emphasised, describing a team that had grown up alongside the sector from very small beginnings.

Editorial Content and Sections

The structure of Spa Business is visible in its published contents pages. Recent issues open with an editor's letter — 'Forever after' and 'The long game' are among the recent themes, addressing longevity and the idea that wellness continues after a guest goes home — followed by news, feedback through the SB Forum, and the 'Spa People' interview series, which profiles figures ranging from biohacking entrepreneurs to the growth chiefs of clinical wellness brands.

Long-form interviews are a signature: recent issues have featured Minor International founder William Heinecke on rolling out a medi-wellness network, Hoshino Resorts' Yoshiharu Hoshino on growth and onsen innovation in Japan, and the Forte family on elevating the spa concepts of Rocco Forte Hotels. Regular strands include new-opening reports, research coverage — such as ISPA studies of the United States spa market and Ipsos work on spa-goer behaviour in Québec — expert question-and-answer features on topics like sleep and environmental, social and governance issues, and opinion columns from regular commentators including Jeremy McCarthy on the psychology and philosophy of modern wellness.

Audience and Reach

Spa Business addresses a global professional audience: spa directors and managers in hotels, resorts, destination spas and day spas; owners and investors; architects and designers; consultants; and the suppliers of skincare, equipment, software and training who serve them. Its twentieth-anniversary editor's letter noted that the team had produced no fewer than eight million ezines alongside its news stories and features, an indication of the scale of its email distribution to that professional readership.

The team's own description of its working year — travelling the world to talk to industry experts — reflects where the audience sits. The magazine is as likely to report from Kerala, Bali, Japan or Italy as from Britain, and its interviewees run groups headquartered on several continents. For suppliers, that concentrated access to senior spa decision-makers internationally is the commercial basis of the title's advertising and sponsored content.

Print, Digital and the Handbook

Spa Business appears in print and in digital editions that replicate the magazine online, with contents pages for each issue published on spabusiness.com. The anniversary history recorded that the team produces some 30 Spa Business and Spa Business Insider magazines across a twelve-month period, a publishing rhythm that combines the flagship title with more frequent insider editions for subscribers.

Alongside the magazines sits the annual Spa Business Handbook, a reference volume for the sector, and a website carrying news every day, supported by email newsletters and social media feeds. The digital operation allows the title to report openings, appointments, acquisitions and research as they are announced, while the print and digital magazines provide the longer interviews and analysis. Together the products make Spa Business less a single periodical than a continuous information service for the spa trade, organised around the magazine brand.

Notable Editors and Contributors

Katie Barnes is the editor of Spa Business and has been associated with the title for almost the whole of its life — in her twentieth-anniversary editor's letter she noted she had been involved for nineteen and a half of its twenty years, having joined Leisure Media as a young beauty journalist. Her editor's letters frame each issue, and her interviews with global operators are a recurring feature. Barnes has also represented the magazine externally, serving, for example, on the judging panel of the Spafinder Wellness 365 Wellness Travel Awards alongside editors from spa publications around the world.

Liz Terry, the founder and editorial director, remains a prominent contributor, interviewing founders and chief executives and writing the title's institutional history. Regular and recurring contributors in recent issues include Kath Hudson, who investigates expert topics and research; Jane Kitchen, who has reported on groups such as Therme; Julie Cramer; and columnist Jeremy McCarthy, the Mandarin Oriental spa leader and author on the psychology of spas, whose reflections on mental wellbeing and technology have become a familiar voice in the magazine.

The Industry It Chronicles

Spa Business's two decades coincide with a transformation its pages have both recorded and, in its own account, helped to shape. Since the magazine's inception in 2003, its editor has written, spas have undergone a profound shift in purpose — from places of pampering to providers of wellness that aim to improve health, educate guests about lifestyle and change quality of life. The magazine's agenda has followed that shift into clinical wellness, longevity, mental health, thermal bathing, biohacking and wellness real estate.

That breadth is visible in a single recent issue's contents, which moved from a US$90 million clinical healing sanctuary in Kerala and a brain-massage concept on the British high street to research on spa revenues and an interview about onsen innovation in Japan. By treating spa as a serious global business sector — with revenues, research bodies such as ISPA and the Global Wellness Summit community as part of its regular beat — Spa Business helped establish the trade-journalism infrastructure the industry previously lacked.

Recent Developments

Spa Business continues to publish through 2025 and into 2026, with issue contents for 2026 showing the established formula intact: editor's letters on the future of wellness, Spa People profiles, interviews with founders including Desa Potato Head's Ronald Akili in conversation with Liz Terry, research coverage reporting that US spas generated an additional US$1 billion in 2025 according to new ISPA research, and sponsored features from wellness suppliers launching longevity and skincare concepts.

The themes of the recent agenda — longevity, clinical and medical wellness, sleep, recovery technology and the commercial metrics of wellness — show a title still tracking the leading edge of its sector rather than merely its traditions. More than twenty years after its launch as the first global spa magazine, and more than forty years after its publisher began writing about spas, Spa Business remains the Hitchin-published magazine through which much of the world's spa industry reads about itself.