Stay at Spa takes on the big travel platforms with a specialist approach to luxury spa hotels

Stay at Spa launches a dedicated luxury spa hotel booking platform for spa and wellness travel

TALLINN, ESTONIA, September 15, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The global online travel market is dominated by platforms offering travellers almost every type of hotel, resort and accommodation in almost every destination. Estonia-based travel company Stay at Spa is entering that market with a very different proposition: instead of trying to sell everything to everyone, it is building a platform around one specific category — luxury spa hotels.

The newly launched Stay at Spa booking platform allows travellers to discover and book luxury spa hotels around the world. The company is initially concentrating its market development on Europe, while making the platform available to international travellers, including customers in the United States and United Kingdom.

The approach may appear deliberately small compared with the scale of the major online travel agencies. That is precisely the point.

Stay at Spa is not attempting to compete with the largest booking platforms by matching their enormous hotel inventories or becoming another general accommodation marketplace. Its strategy is to build depth in a category that is increasingly relevant to travellers but often remains secondary within general hotel booking platforms.

For a traveller searching for an ordinary city hotel, a large generalist booking platform can be perfectly suited to the task. Choosing a luxury spa hotel, however, can involve a different set of considerations. The quality of the spa, treatments, thermal facilities, wellness programmes, location and overall experience can influence the decision as much as the room itself.

Stay at Spa is built around that distinction.

“Large travel platforms have enormous scale, and there is a good reason travellers use them,” said Taavi Tammpere, founder of Stay at Spa. “But scale also means that spa hotels are ultimately one category among many. We wanted to start from the opposite direction. Instead of building a platform where spa is one filter among hundreds, we wanted to build a platform where the spa experience is the starting point.”

The company sees its specialist positioning as its main advantage rather than a limitation. By focusing its attention on spa and wellness accommodation, Stay at Spa aims to create a more relevant discovery and booking experience for travellers whose primary reason for travelling is connected to relaxation, wellness, treatments or the spa itself.

Europe is the company's initial market-development focus. The region has a particularly broad range of spa destinations, from traditional thermal towns and medical wellness resorts to coastal retreats and high-end destination spas. For travellers from the United States and United Kingdom, many of these destinations are established within Europe but can be less familiar when compared with conventional city-break or beach-holiday destinations.

The company believes this creates an opportunity for a specialist platform to connect international travellers with a more focused selection of properties and destinations.

“We are deliberately starting with a narrow category rather than trying to cover the entire travel market,” Tammpere said. “There are thousands of hotels where the spa is an extra facility. Our focus is on the hotels where the spa and wellness experience is genuinely part of why you would choose to stay there.”

The launch also reflects a broader change in the way travellers think about holidays. Travel is increasingly being combined with wellness, recovery and personal time, while spa resorts can serve several purposes at once — from a short weekend escape to a longer wellness-focused holiday.

For Stay at Spa, the opportunity is not simply to create another way to book a hotel. It is to build a travel business around the particular needs of people who choose accommodation because of the experience it provides.

That creates a very different competitive proposition from attempting to outspend or outscale the world's largest online travel companies.

“We know what we are up against,” Tammpere said. “We are a small company entering a market with some very large and established players. We are not going to win by trying to be bigger than them. We have to be more focused.”

That focus will initially be applied to the European market while the booking platform remains open to travellers looking for luxury spa hotels globally. The company plans to expand its hotel network and develop a deeper understanding of the destinations, properties and experiences that matter most to international spa travellers.

The longer-term ambition is to establish Stay at Spa as a specialist travel platform rather than another general hotel marketplace.

“The idea is quite simple,” Tammpere said. “If someone knows they want a luxury spa holiday, they should not have to start with a general hotel search and work backwards. We want to start with what they are actually looking for — the spa.”

For a small company entering a market dominated by global travel platforms, that may be a modest starting point. But it is also a deliberate one: rather than trying to become another giant booking website, Stay at Spa is betting that there is room for a specialist built around one increasingly important type of travel.

Taavi Tammpere
Stay at Spa
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