Sydney is in the middle of a water wellness boom.
Sense of Self is opening the city’s largest bathhouse in Surry Hills, more than 1,000 square metres of magnesium pools, saunas and plunge baths. Soak is opening a second location in Bondi. Saint Haven is launching six floors of wellness, bathing and recovery in North Sydney. Escape Bathhouse has already turned the heritage listed Seymour Building in Chatswood into one of the North Shore’s most loved wellness destinations. And that is just the start.
We watch this industry up close. At The Pool Service Co we look after hundreds of residential pools across Sydney, but we also manage a large portfolio of commercial pools, including bathhouses like Escape, hotel pools, and apartment and strata pools for groups like Meriton. So when we say this industry is growing, we are not reading about it. We are in it every day.
And it is not a Sydney thing. It is everywhere. Wellness tourism is now a trillion dollar global industry, tipped to reach 1.7 trillion dollars by 2033. So it is worth asking the obvious question. Why is this happening?
Why the industry is growing
Three things are driving it. First, people are choosing experiences over things. A bathhouse session is affordable luxury. For the price of a dinner out, you get two hours of warm mineral water, sauna, steam and cold plunge, and you walk out feeling better than when you walked in. Not many purchases can promise that.
Second, wellbeing has become the priority. People are drinking less, sleeping more and taking recovery seriously. Social wellness is one of the biggest trends of 2026, with group cold plunges and bathhouse catch ups replacing nights at the pub. The bathhouse has become what the local used to be, a place to connect, just healthier.
Third, the science keeps stacking up. This is not a fad built on marketing. Water genuinely works.
Why water works
Swimming is already Australia’s thing. More than 4.4 million Australians swim each year, it sits in the top five activities for adults, and it is the number one sport for Australian kids. The reason is simple. Water supports your body weight, so swimming builds fitness and strength while staying kind to your joints. It is one of the few forms of exercise you can do at 8 or 80.
The recovery side is just as compelling:
- Warm water eases sore muscles, improves circulation and helps the body wind down. There is a reason therapy pools sit around 34 to 38 degrees.
- Cold water reduces inflammation and is now standard practice in professional sport. The Paris 2024 Olympics used 650 tonnes of ice for athlete recovery, ten times what Tokyo used four years earlier.
- Sauna has decades of Finnish research behind it, with regular use linked to significantly lower rates of cardiovascular disease compared to occasional use.
- Contrast therapy, moving between hot and cold, is the core of the modern bathhouse circuit, and what began with elite athletes is now a Tuesday night for ordinary people.
Commercial venues now make up more than 80 per cent of the cold plunge market. Recovery studios, bathhouses and therapy pools are opening in suburbs that had never heard of a cold plunge five years ago.
Hotels have worked it out too
Hotels are seeing the same shift, and the numbers are hard to ignore. Hotels that added wellness facilities saw a 26 per cent lift in total revenue per available room, driven partly by a 10 per cent rise in occupancy. Hotel and resort spas are now the single largest segment of the global spa market.
Guests are booking differently. The pool, spa, sauna and steam room used to be nice extras. Now they are deciding factors. Travellers swim laps before meetings, use the spa after long flights and choose hotels based on the recovery facilities on offer. Indoor pools in particular are being used harder than ever, because they offer year round, low impact fitness regardless of the weather.
For a hotel, that pool is no longer a photo for the website. It is a revenue driver. Which means the water in it has never mattered more.
All of it runs on clean water
Behind every beautiful bathhouse photo sits a simple truth. These venues live or die on water quality.
A backyard pool that turns cloudy is annoying. A cloudy mineral pool at a bathhouse charging 75 to 99 dollars a session is a business killer. One bad review about water clarity or hygiene can undo years of brand building. And the risk is real, because these facilities are the hardest bodies of water to keep right:
- Warm water is a breeding ground. Spas, therapy pools and steam rooms sit at temperatures bacteria love.
- Bather loads are heavy and constant. Dozens of bodies through the same water, every hour, every day.
- Mixed systems, mixed chemistry. A single bathhouse can run a 37 degree mineral pool, a 12 degree ice bath, steam rooms and saunas side by side, and each needs its own balance.
- There is no quiet season. A bathhouse cannot close for a week because the filter is struggling. Neither can a hotel or an apartment building.
This is why the venues that last are not the ones with the best interiors. They are the ones with the best systems behind the scenes. In this industry, water quality is not a maintenance line item. It is the product.
What good looks like
Whether it is a hotel pool, a strata pool, a swim school or a recovery studio, the standard is the same:
- Digital water testing on every visit, with results recorded, not guessed
- A written service report after every visit, so management always knows the state of their water
- Preventative equipment checks on pumps, filters, chlorinators and heaters, so problems are caught before they become closures
- Chemistry matched to the venue, because a 12 degree plunge pool and a 38 degree spa are different animals
- The same technician every time, someone who knows the site, the system and its history
That last point matters more than people realise. Water problems rarely announce themselves. They show up as small drifts in readings that only someone familiar with the pool will catch early.
How we run our commercial pools
Keeping a venue like Escape Bathhouse right means managing a warm mineral pool, ice baths and steam side by side, every single day, to a standard hundreds of guests will judge within seconds of stepping in.
Some of our commercial clients we service every day, weekends included. One sees our technician every day of the year except Good Friday and Christmas Day. That is 363 visits a year, same standard, same accountability, every visit.
And it is the same technician each time. Our Dedicated Pool Tech model means the person testing your water on Tuesday is the same person who balanced it on Monday. They know the pool. They notice the small changes. For a commercial venue, it is like having a full time pool manager on staff, without the payroll.
Every visit ends with a digital water test and a service report. Management can see exactly what was checked, what was adjusted and why. No guesswork. No surprises. If equipment needs attention, we say so before it fails, and we only recommend replacements when they genuinely make sense. No upselling, ever.
The industry is growing. The standard has to grow with it.
Bathhouses, recovery studios, hotel spas and therapy pools are only going to multiply, because people have discovered something that makes them feel better, and they are not going back. The winners will be the venues that treat water quality as seriously as they treat design and marketing.
If you manage a commercial pool, a strata pool, a bathhouse or a recovery facility and you want water you never have to think about, we should talk. And if you own a backyard pool, the same team and the same standards look after those too.
Book a free pool assessment. Or call and speak with a pool tech.
Sources for editors: Urban List Sydney and Time Out on Sydney bathhouse openings, Escape Bathhouse via sydney.com and Australian Traveller, AusPlay and Swimming Australia on participation, Mayo Clinic Proceedings on Finnish sauna research, Grand View Research on the spa services and cold plunge markets, Global Wellness Institute on hydrothermal trends, hotel wellness revenue data via industry TRevPAR analysis, Paris 2024 ice usage from Olympic operations figures.
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