“In 2005 I was trapped on the financial market and seeking a place to escape to for a bit of relaxation,” says the owner of Eden Spa, Liliana Paraipan, who had tried the spa centres outside Romania and realised this market needed to be opened in Romania, as well. In August 2005, Liliana Paraipan, at the time deputy general manager at the Romanian Commodity Exchange, decided to open her own spa, the first such centre in Romania, - after training in spa management and marketing in the US.

In 2005, three months after the launch of the spa business, Paraipan left her position at the Commodity Exchange and started to work on educating the market: “It was not easy for me to sell the spa therapy concept, because relaxation was directly associated with spending time in beauty parlours and body contouring. The spa concept, on the other hand, is based on the idea that beauty starts from the inside out, placing the psyche and the body on the same level.” It took about a year until the new owner created a client base for Eden Spa, much smaller than her current one - 5,000 clients (around 1,200 new clients come to the spa per year, half of whom return regularly for treatment).

Paraipan also runs the largest spa in Romania, which was opened at the end of last year on a 2,000 square-metre area within the 5-star hotel Hilton in Sibiu. The around 4 million-euro investment in opening the spa at the Hilton was made by the hotel, as a result of a partnership between Liliana Paraipan and Nicolae Minea, owner of Hilton Sibiu. The collaboration between Minea and Paraipan began in mid-last year, when the hotel was still under renovation, but it also targets the opening of at least three hotels “equipped” with a spa, similar in format to the one in Sibiu. However, the discussion on this partnership came last, according to Minea, who chose to work with Liliana Paraipan after several distributors of spa equipment and products sent him their offers. “Liliana, however, came with a fully developed operational plan, so we found her proposition to be the most interesting one.” This made the two decide to extend their collaboration to the hotels to be opened under the Hilton brand in the near future.