A Platform Proposal · Prepared for RockResorts
A minute to book.A reason to return.
A reservation, gift, and guest platform for the RockResorts collection — built to the standard the spas themselves keep, for the guests who pay to keep it.
This brand has always been early.
On December 1, 1956, Laurance Rockefeller opened Caneel Bay on St. John — the same day the land around it became Virgin Islands National Park. A resort and a national park, born together. The hotels that followed — Mauna Kea, Little Dix Bay, Woodstock Inn — practiced a conservation-minded luxury decades before the industry had a word for it.
Vail Resorts acquired RockResorts in 2001 to carry that standard into the mountains. Today the collection numbers seven properties from Vail to Park City, and it is growing: Kindred Resort joined at Keystone in May 2026, with a spa at the center of its idea of luxury.
The spas hold the standard beautifully in person. This proposal is about extending it to the one place it does not yet reach — the guest's phone.
Caneel Bay opens; Virgin Islands National Park established the same day
Mauna Kea — the most expensive hotel ever built at the time
Vail Resorts acquires RockResorts as its luxury flag
Kindred Resort joins the collection at Keystone
The company has already named this priority.
Vail Resorts spent 2026 putting guest experience and in-app commerce at the center of its growth plan. The spa is the highest-touch guest experience in the portfolio — and the one line of business the digital investment has not yet reached.
“The next chapter of growth for Vail Resorts is about delivering a guest experience that undeniably leads the ski industry and is best in class in the travel sector.”
In the app, we're not doing any commerce, and we don't have easy ways like Apple Pay and Google Pay to close a sale.
U.S. hotel spa revenue per available room, 2018–2022 — while hotels sold 8.2% fewer room nights
CBRE Trends · Tier A/B
Annual spa revenue per available room at luxury hotels
CBRE, 2024 · Tier A/B
Forecast annual growth of the global spa sector through 2029
Global Wellness Institute, 2025 · Tier A/B
Fiscal 2027 began August 1. The calendar-2027 capital plan is assembled this fall. Spa revenue does not depend on snowfall.
Today, every booking begins with a phone call.
Across the collection, spa reservations are taken by telephone during desk hours. The guest who books a room, a lift ticket, and dinner from her phone cannot book a massage the same way. Four exhibits, presented at speaking pace.
One app for the whole collection.
A RockResorts Spa app, designed to the brand's own standard: reservations and requests, gift cards honored at every property, a profile that remembers how a guest likes her massage — from Vail to Park City.
Arrive
The collection at a glance — tonight's availability, the winter menu, the properties by name.
Reserve
Treatment, therapist, hour. Booked in under a minute, confirmed in writing, remembered forever.
Return
Preferences, history, and a gift balance that travels between mountains.
A booking flow with manners.
Not a feature list — an evening. Here is one reservation at The Arrabelle, told the way a guest will actually live it.
00 :0000 PMThe couch decision
Claire is off the mountain, fed, and finally still. She opens the app: the real menu, plainly priced — Sacred Stone, 80 minutes, $515 in season. Tomorrow at 3:00 looks right. Michaela, if she's free. She is.
RockResorts Spa · The Arrabelle
Sacred Stone Massage
$515
80 minutes · basalt stones · in season
Tomorrow 3:00 PMMichaela S.Room preference kept00 :0000 PMBooked, in writing
Two minutes, start to confirmation. Therapist preference respected, intake signed from the sofa, one enhancement offered once and politely — a quarter of guests say yes when asked well. The desk never rang.
Confirmed · in writing
Sacred Stone, 80 min — tomorrow, 3:00 PM
The Arrabelle · Michaela S. · intake signed from the sofa
Added to Wallet9:43 PM00 :0000 AMThe quiet reminder
A text with the hour, the spa's door, and a one-tap reschedule. Reminders like this cut missed appointments by roughly a third — the academic number is 38%, and it alone pays for the feature.
RRRockResorts Spa
Messages
Today 7:30 AM
Good morning, Claire — Sacred Stone with Michaela today at 3:00 PM. Doors at 2:45; robes are warm. Reply R to reschedule.Reminders cut missed appointments ≈ 38% · Imperial College London
00 :0000 PMTen minutes early
She walks the aspen-lit corridor with nothing to sign and nothing to spell out loud. The room is warm before she is. That is the whole trick: the software disappears, and the spa gets the credit.
Treatment room 6ready 2:47 PM
Four touches, two of them hers. The desk never rang, and the spa never looked like software.
Give the mountains.
A RockResorts Spa gift card, purchased in a minute, honored at all seven properties. Gift cards are the quietest revenue in the industry — sold online while the spa sleeps, redeemed by guests who often arrive for the first time.
of gift-card holders spend beyond the card's face value
Fiserv Prepaid Consumer Insights, 2024
of wellness gift-card redemptions are brand-new guests
Zenoti, 2024 · vendor-reported
annual growth in online spa gift-card sales
Zenoti, 2024 · vendor-reported
Spa CollectionRun the pointer across it — the foil answers
The managers' morning view.
The queue
The numbers
front-desk time returned per week by self-service booking
front-desk hours at spas after moving booking online
Works with what already works.
The platform is a guest-experience layer, engineered to sit on top of the systems the spas already trust. Where a property runs a modern scheduling core, we integrate through its interface. Where one is still on legacy software, the platform provides answered requests on day one and a measured migration path — with no interruption at the desk.
RockResorts Spa Experience — this proposal
- Reservations & requests
- Gift cards, all properties
- Profiles & preferences
- Concierge chat
- The managers' hub
The scheduling core — theirs to keep
- Book4Time-class systems
- Therapist & room scheduling
- POS and folio posting
The resort ecosystem
- Property systems
- Payment processors — card data never touches the platform
- My Epic adjacency, when invited
Payments are tokenized through established processors; the platform holds no cardholder data. Guest information is handled under a data-processing agreement, encrypted in transit and at rest, with access logged. Insurance certificates and security documentation are ready for vendor review.
The arithmetic, with sources.
Figures below are drawn from public-company disclosures, major research firms, and — where marked — the platforms' own reporting. Weaker folklore statistics common in this category were checked and set aside.
of Marriott's U.S. room nights now come through loyalty members, with the app its lowest-cost direct channel
Tier AMarriott Q4 2024 earnings call
online bookings within six months of unified digital booking at Massage Heights (160+ locations)
Tier CZenoti case study
U.S. spa industry revenue, growing 5.8% a year at $120.30 per visit
Tier A/BISPA / PwC Big Five, 2025
revenue lift from personalization done well — the case for a real guest profile
Tier A/BMcKinsey, Next in Personalization
chat exchanges per stay by engaged luxury guests — digital deepens high-touch service at Four Seasons
Tier BFour Seasons, 2019
accounts in EpicMix's first season — this company invented resort-app engagement in 2010
Tier AVail Resorts, 2011
Two numbers we chose not to use: the widely repeated "30% spa no-show rate" (platform benchmarks show 3–5%), and "5% retention equals 95% profit" (the original research says 25–85%). The case holds without them.
We move quickly: a four-phase rollout for a Q4 launch.
Twelve weeks from signature to a live platform — phases overlapped the way a studio actually ships, with a decision gate closing each one. A September start is live as the season's first lifts begin turning; last winter the earliest Colorado openings came in late October, and the collection was full by the holidays.
Discovery & Platform Blueprint
Weeks 1–4Credited in full against the build.
- Spa-system and data audit across the seven properties
- Guest-journey map and technical architecture
- Security & data-handling plan; risk register
- Fixed-price build plan and board-ready business case
Simple pricing. Get started for under $20k.
Custom platforms of this scope run $200,000 to $350,000 at U.S. studios; the off-the-shelf alternative for a multi-property chain runs $120,000 to $180,000 in fees every year, with another company's software in front of the guest. This program is priced as an owned asset, phase-gated so each commitment funds the certainty of the next.
Discovery & Platform Blueprint
Weeks 1–4 · fixed fee · credited against the build
Experience Design
Weeks 4–7
Platform Build & First Integration
Weeks 6–11
Launch & Collection Rollout
Weeks 11–12 · rollout continues through the season
The only decision this proposal asks for is Discovery: $19,500, four weeks, fully credited against the build. It produces the integration assessment, the prototype, and a fixed price — whatever is decided after that is decided with evidence.
For capital planning before scoping: a budgetary estimate of $225,000–$325,000 (±25%), converted to a fixed, phase-gated price at the end of Discovery.
For scale: the full program is roughly one-eighth of one percent of the company's annual capital plan.
Care from $4,500/month after launch — support, monitoring, iteration; the 12-month warranty honored.
Essentials
Web-only, requests-first
≈ $185,000
Recommended program
As tabled above
$275,000
Signature
Promo videos, AI concierge, expanded 3rd party integrations
≈ $395,000
Weekly working demos. A decision gate closes each phase. A named risk register from week one. Support and a twelve-month warranty from launch — the same warranty period Vail's own purchase terms ask of its vendors.
A studio built for exactly this.
Zen2 is an independent design and engineering studio. The work is done by the principal who presents it — research, design, and code from one pair of hands, to one standard.
Before Zen2, that principal founded Taxfyle, the consumer tax platform that became Robinhood's in-app filing partner and earned Apple's App of the Day. Building a polished consumer app on top of an industry's entrenched back-office systems is not a theory here — it is the résumé.
Recent clients include Sopris Capital, American Bath Group, and Converge Health Partners — each shipped as a complete digital identity, on time, with a twelve-month warranty behind it.
Taxfyle
Founded by Zen2's principal — consumer fintech at scale
Robinhood
In-app tax filing partnership
App of the Day
Featured by Apple, App Store
Studio
Zen2, Inc. — Florida, USA
Principal
Will Sahatdjian
Contact
info@zen2.ai · zen2.ai
Engagement
Direct with principal · Coupa-ready
