The Global Spa Summit brought together the leaders, investors, researchers, and operators who built the modern spa and wellness industry. From its first gathering in 2007 through its evolution into the Global Wellness Summit, the organization commissioned the landmark economic research that, for the first time, put a credible number on the size of the global wellness economy — and gave a fragmented industry a shared language and an evidence base.
A summit that defined an industry
When the spa industry first convened at a global level, it was growing quickly but measuring itself poorly. Operators knew demand was rising; what no one could agree on was how big the market actually was, how its segments fit together, or where the next decade of growth would come from. The Global Spa Summit was created to close that gap — convening an annual, invitation-level meeting of the industry’s most senior decision-makers and pairing it with rigorous, independently produced research.
That research program is the reason the summit is still cited today. Studies commissioned through the summit reframed wellness not as a niche amenity but as a multi-trillion-dollar global market spanning hospitality, tourism, fitness, beauty, preventive health, and real estate.
The research that changed the conversation
- Wellness Is No Passing Fad — the finding that the global health and wellness market was worth nearly $2 trillion, establishing wellness as a durable economic force rather than a trend.
- The Global Spa & Wellness Economy Report — sizing the spa cluster and its adjacent markets across every world region.
- The $106 Billion Wellness Tourism Market — the research that defined wellness tourism and explained why conceptual confusion was holding it back.
- Spas, Wellness & Medical Tourism — mapping three overlapping markets that are often conflated.
From the summit floor
The summit was as much about candid debate as it was about data. At the first-ever gathering, delegates named the industry’s talent and labor shortage as its single greatest challenge — a structural issue the sector still works to solve. Each year the program drew keynote speakers from medicine, economics, hospitality, and design to push the conversation forward.
Building the evidence base
Beyond market sizing, the summit championed the idea that spa and wellness therapies deserve a real research foundation. That conviction produced initiatives like Spa Evidence, which gathered the science behind individual modalities — from hydrotherapy to nutritional counseling — and a broader call for collecting, analyzing, and sharing research across the spa and hotel industry. Underpinning all of it was the practical work of defining wellness and the structure of the spa economy itself.
This site preserves and revisits that body of work — the reports, the findings, and the ideas that helped a global industry understand itself.