Adding a sauna to your business

A sauna earns for a venue in two quiet ways. The first is retention: it gives people a reason to stay longer, come back sooner and keep the membership they might otherwise have cancelled. The second is secondary spend: a bookable session, an add-on to a stay, a reason to arrive early and leave late.

Fowey Hall Hotel in Cornwall is the clearest picture of both. They added one horsebox sauna to the lawn above the estuary. Guests booked it, stayed longer in the quieter months, and the group has gone on to add two more saunas across their hotels.

None of this asks you to become a sauna business. Your padel club stays a padel club, your site stays a site. The sauna is a new line on the same books.

The same sauna earns differently depending on what is around it. Here is where we see it work, with the full guide for each:

• Padel clubs. There are 200+ padel clubs in the UK and the differentiator is moving to what happens after the match. Read how padel clubs are turning saunas into a revenue stream.
• CrossFit boxes and gyms. 900+ boxes in the UK, and recovery culture is reshaping what members expect from them. Read why CrossFit boxes are adding saunas.
• Glamping sites and holiday parks. 2,000+ sites in the UK, and a sauna is the one thing guests keep asking for. Read the complete guide to adding a sauna to your glamping site.
• Wild swimming and coastal venues. Heat beside cold water extends the season at both ends. See the operators already running on the map, many of them by the sea.
• Hotels and country houses. A spa alternative without a spa build. Read the Fowey Hall story.

If your venue is not on that list but your customers already arrive for something active, outdoors or restorative, the pattern usually still holds.

We build three saunas: the horsebox sauna, the 10ft container sauna and the 20ft container sauna. Which one suits you comes down to space, capacity and whether the sauna ever needs to move; the honest comparison walks through that decision.

Most venues think about the cost monthly, the same way they think about the revenue. Financed through Johnson Reed, a sauna starts from around £1,000 a month. Set that against what your venue would charge for sessions, add-ons or longer stays, and the arithmetic is short.

Running costs stay simple: a wood-fired heater burns a few bags of logs a week, and an electric heater draws power only while it runs. Maintenance is included for the first year.

There are two routes to a sauna on your site:

• Buy. From your own funds, or spread the cost from around £1,000 a month through our finance partner, Johnson Reed, so the sauna can earn from the month it arrives rather than after a capital outlay. You own the asset and keep everything it earns.
• Partner. For select opportunities, the no-capital route. We place and maintain the sauna, you provide the site and the customers, and we share what it earns. If the numbers work for your venue, you add heat without spending a pound up front.

Which route fits depends on your balance sheet and how central the sauna is to your plans. It is one of the first things we work through on a call.

Fowey Hall started with one horsebox sauna on the lawn. After a season of guests booking it, the group committed to two more across their hotels: one sauna became three. Their full story, with photographs, is here.

And they are not alone. The operator map shows the businesses running our saunas across the UK right now, from island shores to hotel lawns, each one a working answer to the question you are asking.

The first step is a 20-minute call. Tell us what your venue is, what your customers already come for and where a sauna might sit. Before we speak, we send a revenue model tailored to your site, so the call starts from your numbers rather than ours.

From there: choose the build, choose the route (Buy or Partner), and we build in weeks, deliver and install. Everything you need is on our page for businesses, or start with the form below.