Unit economics · margin on new investment
Where each part of the bundled fee actually goes.
The question the board needs answered is narrower than a generic contribution-margin calculation. The Ayush Spa already exists and operates profitably at its own margin; the Medilab partnership operates at Medilab's margin on the analyser, lab staff, and lab-side accreditation cost it carries. What we are adding on top is the programme layer — the additional clinical time (Dr Shiv Chande as Medical Director, the dietitian, the psychologist, the health coach), the diagnostic infrastructure, the sleep reporting software, the post-stay follow-up. The new hires and the upfront capex have to be paid back from the residual portion of each bundled fee — what's left after the Ayush and Medilab pass-throughs — not from the gross fee.
Methodology — three layers in the bundled fee
Each programme is sold as a single bundled fee. Inside that fee, money flows in three directions. One — Nidana pass-through: the bloodwork tier delivered at Medilab's indicative pricing. The hotel collects this and pays it to Medilab (operating Nidana under service contract); Medilab carry the analyser, lab-side accreditation, and lab staff. Clinical interpretation sits with the in-house medical team on the hotel side of the boundary (see the Sama Clinic page). No new economics for the hotel on the Nidana side. Two — Kanti aesthetic (where chosen): pure aesthetic procedures (Botox, fillers, thread lifts) are priced separately at Dr Alexa Kerr's rates and are not part of the bundled programme fee — a guest choosing them adds them on top. Any programme-included skin-quality work (LED, hydrafacial, chemical peels, HIFU) sits in the residual below rather than as pass-through. Three — net to hotel: what's left. This residual funds the new programme delivery — the expanded clinical time (Dr Shiv Chande, the Manas psychologist, the dietitian, the kinesiology scientist, Dr Marie-Christine Dix's Klesha stream, the DEXA operator at Deha), in-house diagnostic infrastructure (Deha DEXA, on-site Kaya movement work, Nidana blood-draw room), Aruna and Hima operating cost, sleep tracking, coaching, written protocols, and post-stay follow-up. After costing those new items, the contribution to new investment is the residual minus the new costs.
Ayush spa treatments sit outside the bundled fee. Programme guests can optionally request a written Ayurvedic prescription from their Prakriti Mati consultation (dosha reading, current-imbalance picture, and a suggested treatment sequence) — it's offered on request, not automatic. Guests book treatments separately through the Ayush spa at retail brochure rates — at reservation, on arrival, or as they go — the same way a non-programme hotel guest or a Jersey local books, and with or without the prescription guiding their choice. Guests who've already booked a slot can choose whether to hear the recommendation or not. The programme is deliberately not a spa upsell. This keeps the £800 / £1,790 / £3,290 / £8,050 headline honest as the price of clinical work and infrastructure, and lets the Ayush spa continue to operate on its own margin as a first-class hotel department (see the Ayush Spa page).
This is deliberately more conservative than a headline-contribution view. It treats the Nidana bloodwork as a third-party fee that the hotel collects and forwards without margin, and answers the question that actually needs answered: does the residual pay back the new investment?
Programme prices — £800 (Weekend) / £1,790 (Pause, lifted from £1,680 to hold 31% margin after the six-marker Nidana Section Six review) / £3,290 (Reset, held; margin absorbs the pass-through delta from 63% to 61%) / £8,050 (View, held pending its own Sama Clinic rework). Focus revenue — described in the Focus architecture section above — sits above and separate from these figures: a Long Reset guest choosing three Focuses at £700–£1,500 each adds £2,000–£4,500 of Focus revenue on top of the £3,290 programme fee, with a per-Focus cost that is materially lower than the Focus retail price (Focus margins run higher than programme margins because the fixed clinical spine is already funded by the base fee). The blended per-guest fee at the modelled Focus attach rate is therefore meaningfully above the £3,290 headline, and this is what makes the expanded workforce (~£570–835k on Sama Clinic) fundable.
Key unit-cost assumptions for the new-programme-delivery items: Dr Shiv Chande's medical time at £90/hour loaded (£90k base + 15% on-costs / 1,175 direct-patient hours/yr); Dr Prasanna Kerur's programme time at £65/hour loaded; the Manas psychologist and dietitian at £55/hour each; the kinesiology scientist at £40/hour; health coach at £30/hour; practice nurse at £35/hour loaded. Deha DEXA all-in per-scan cost ~£50 (IR(ME)R-certified operator time + machine amortisation + reporting); the £70–120k capex is amortised over ten years. On-site Kaya panel (FMS + grip + single-plate + Theia3D markerless motion capture) ~£95 per full session. Orion Sleep System amortisation £5/night. Hima cryotherapy marginal cost ~£8/session (LN2 + operator time + wear allocation); the £53–90k chamber capex amortises over ten-to-fifteen years. Aruna marginal cost ~£3/session (LED panel time + minor consumables). Room and food are excluded — they are charged separately from the programme fee, priced at Hotel de France's existing rates, and already operate at the hotel's own margin. Nidana pass-through values at April 2026 indicative midpoints, post the Section Six six-marker fold-in (Tier 1 ~£105, Tier 2 ~£290, Tier 3 ~£470, Tier 4 ~£690) — GI-MAP microbiome analysis (now standard on every programme) adds ~£300–400 per guest at wholesale, negotiable at volume; per-tier pricing is reviewed at month six and twelve. Full per-tier marker-level detail on the Nidana page.
What this section still needs. The residual-margin figures below and the "What this tells us" analysis that follows were computed against the earlier, smaller clinical architecture (two named clinicians, Medilab-as-governance, no Deha, no Kaya launch hire, no Klesha, no Focus revenue) and have not been re-run since the six-marker Nidana Section Six review — the Medilab pass-through midpoint on Tier 3 has moved £340 → £470, on Tier 2 £205 → £310. Numbers below are indicative of directional shape only and will overstate margin because they under-count the new workforce and under-count the Focus revenue upside. The individual programme detail pages (Pause, Reset) carry the honest, updated cost stacks; a full per-programme rebuild of this summary — new cost stack per tier, Focus attach-rate assumptions, updated pass-throughs — sits on the Notes page as pending work.
Summary — residual margin across the four programmes
The four programmes compared on the bundled-fee basis, with the Ayush and Medilab pass-throughs subtracted to show what's actually available to the hotel for new-investment contribution. The line-by-line build-up for each programme sits on its individual page (Weekend, Pause, Reset, View).
Toggle on — cryotherapy added. The margin figures below reflect cryotherapy's per-guest marginal cost (LN2 supply, operator time, wear allocation at roughly £8/session): –£12 on Long Weekend, –£36 on Long Pause, –£52 on Long Reset, –£96 on Long View. Fixed cryo opex (£20–35k/year) is recovered through the local revenue stream (Cryo Add-on memberships plus single-session drop-in), not through bundled-fee margin.
Programme
Bundled fee
Pass-through(Medilab — Ayush unbundled)
Net to hotel
Margin on residual
The Long Weekend2.5 nights
£800
£105
£695
£370 (53%)
The Long Pause5 nights
£1,790
£310
£1,480
£755 (51%)
The Long Reset7 nights · flagship
£3,290
£470
£2,820
£2,113 (75%)
The Long View12 nights
£8,050
£690
£7,360
£6,082 (83%)
What this tells us
The discussion below uses the toggle-off baseline figures for clarity. With cryotherapy committed, each programme's residual margin is reduced by the amounts noted in the toggle box above; the qualitative conclusions are unchanged.
Every programme covers its own new-investment costs with a comfortable margin. This is the result of deliberately pricing the Weekend and Pause to avoid a loss-leader structure — and of the recent Ayush spa unbundling, which took spa treatments outside the bundled fee and recovered that layer as clinical margin. The Long Weekend at £800 returns £370 (53%) on its £695 net-to-hotel residual; the Long Pause at £1,790 returns £755 (51%) on £1,480; the Long Reset at £3,290 returns £2,113 (75%) on £2,820; the Long View at £8,050 returns £6,082 (83%) on £7,360. The ladder is coherent rather than dependent on cross-subsidy. Only Medilab pass-through (clinical bloodwork) sits outside this residual — paid through the bundled fee but not drawing on hotel margin. Ayush spa treatments now sit outside the bundled fee entirely, billed separately at retail brochure rates.
The Weekend still plays an acquisition role even while paying its own way. The all-in total sits around £1,575 (programme fee plus entry-tier room and food, single occupancy) — at the upper end of what a guest will try as a first-visit introduction, but generating £370 of genuine new-investment contribution per booking rather than running at cost. The £250 credit toward a Long Reset within 90 days continues to do the ladder-conversion work; the healthy residual margin means the Weekend is no longer a pure marketing expense to be measured on conversion alone. It earns its keep at the unit level and feeds the funnel.
The Long Pause is a genuine margin contributor, not just a ladder step. At 51% margin on the £1,480 net-to-hotel residual it returns £755 per booking. The Pause is not waiting on future conversion to justify itself — it earns its own keep while the ladder-conversion incentive (a credit toward a Long Reset within twelve months) continues to do its work.
The Long Reset is the margin anchor. £2,113 of new-investment contribution per booking means roughly 100-110 Long Reset bookings per year would cover the entire annual new-investment burden unassisted. At the modelled Year 3 steady-state mix of 20% Reset guests on the current programme book, that is comfortably met — the Reset is materially over-subscribing the burden once volume settles.
The Long View carries disproportionate weight. £6,082 of new-investment contribution per booking means even at the 10% View mix, this single programme delivers a substantial share of total contribution. Pricing discipline on the View matters most — the View's residual margin is the highest in the ladder and almost every additional pound of bundled fee, after the Medilab pass-through, flows through to new-investment contribution.
What needs to be true, commercially. At the Year 3 steady-state mix — 40% Weekend / 30% Pause / 20% Reset / 10% View — every 100 guests generates a blended per-guest contribution comfortably above the £217k annualised new-investment burden well before reaching the ~840-guest steady-state book. The five-year forecast leaves meaningful headroom on mix assumptions; a drift toward more Weekends (say 60/25/13/2) would still clear the burden but with thinner margin of safety.
