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the story

in the nineties i had two naturopathic clinics in zurich. i always continued to study new natural healing methods, among others plenty of manual ones, and so started to appreciate the advantages of therapeutic massages. on the way back from my studies in TCM (traditional chinese medicine) in china, i had a stopover in bangkok and new immediately „i want to live here“. it took another 10 years until i finally moved to thailand, but during these years i already spent a significant amount of my time in the kingdom. my passion for massage treatments of all kinds had begun. 

until then the idea of having an oil massage was not appealing to me at all, and even while in thailand my new love for massages was often gone: when having an oil massage i mostly felt like a chicken on the grill, and it happend that after a thai massage i could hardly walk - means, from the point of view of a naturopath the quality of massages on offer in thailand was extremely poor. nevertheless i suffered myself through about 2‘000 massages, from which 95% were pure torture, 2% so la la, 2% really good, and 1% absolutely extraordinary - provided by therapists who did not learn their art on any academy, but were natural born healers who actually never had to learn but rather teach. during all the bad and awful treatments i kept myself motivated only by imagining in detail where and how improvements would be possible, in order to achieve the original healing power of great massages, and to improve the often very painful techniques by making them more enjoyable and more efficient.   

at the beginning of the millenium i moved to thailand and obviously arrived at the right time; the best and most famous hotels and resorts wanted to hire me - it was the beginning of the wellness boom. i was talking to companies like six senses, chiva som, tao garden and others, but finally took the offer from the, what i still believe until today, is one of the very best hotels in the world - the amanpuri in phuket. i was fond of the ambiance, the architecture, the philosophy - started to work like a maniac and probably became a nightmare for some of my staff, with whom i wanted to realize all the massages i had previously created in my mind. we worked hard and improved the already good five star treatments significantly, which lead to the nomination as „best spa in a hotel/resort worldwide“ by the „galivanter‘s guide“ (the leading hotel guide for topclass hotels) within only one year - leaving the long time winner „oriental“ in bangkok behind us on place two. this made me especially glad and proud since for me the oriental runs one of the few spas worldwide which i personally like and recommend.

one year later i heard of a hotel being under construction which should top the amanpuri and become the new standard for what should be the „best hotel in the world“ - a dream come true for a team of former amanpuri top managers. i joined, and as spa director and EAM (vice general manager) i was able to realize, without any compromises, what i had carried in my mind for 10 years. it started with amazing buildings and unique equipment; i was searching the world market for the proper equipment without success, so we produced most of it by ourselves. same with the treatments, for which i united the best therapists of the kingdom to a simply amazing dream team - i remembered the few excellent massages i had over the years, tracked these therapists down and hired them on the spot; they all accepted. i then spent months and months to train them my unique treatment philosophy (see PHILOSOPHY) and the addition of something they all had never heard of before; a true high class service which should make our guests feel in heaven.

in addition i regularly went to the so called best spa academies in the kingdom (mainly in bangkok), interviewed and tested the just graduated therapists and again hired the few unique ones right away. surprising was the fact that in the most famous academies i hardly ever found what i was looking for - for example in the famous wat poh temple academy; dozends of fruitless interviews and test treatments lead to the conclusion that i would not waste time with visiting this place anymore. until today i rarely hired anybody with a wat poh certificate - and with the few exceptions i made i had to learn that i indeed only wasted time. on the other side i found small schools where i could feel the teacher‘s passion and over the years often successfully came back for recruitment.

i remember well that, after more than six months of training, the general manager asked me „what are you doing, george? all other departments have their teams together and training completed, and you still travel through the country looking for „the exceptional ones“. however, he trusted me - which should pay out later, when after another six months he was happy to say „throughout all departments there is only the spa department i received only excellent feedback about and not one single complaint, and this since day one. while we often had a chaos in other departments like F+B (pretty normal during soft openings), our often very demanding guests had nothing but praise for the spa“. this made me happier than all the awards which followed later, as it came directly from one of the very best hotel professionals i know, and not from a „bought“ journalist, a practice which became very common in the industry.

following this were years of traveling and learning, mainly in exactly those health resorts (wellness hotels) which wanted to hire me years ago, some of the most praised ones in the world, like chiva som in hua hin or tao garden in chiang mai. i learned a lot indeed, among other things how NOT to do it, and finally set up my own company phuket home massage, the first high class spa delivery service in thailand, where we laid the foundation for what we are doing now with zueri home massage. this worked very well, we had most phuket VIPs being our regular guests, and even years after we closed the company (because we moved away and therefore sold the company to a competitor - who shut it down immediately) some of our former clients kept calling asking „george, what shall we do - nobody offers massages like you did - where can we go?“.

after living in the north for a while we moved back to phuket, where i got an excellent job offer i could not refuse, and could use my concept again, since the owner had a lot of courage and followed my recommendation NOT to build a spa at all, but to transfer each and every hotel room (actually mini-villa) into a spa-suite, where the guest can enjoy all treatments in the privacy of his villa - pretty much like we did it with phuket home massage. this hotel was called phuket pavilions, now the pavilions-resorts. still a great hotel, but the spa service unfortunately lost its quality.

from there it was philosophically a short, but geographically a long way to zueri home massage, where i have the pleasure to be able to even go one step further, as i did not have to take a pseudo moral with very deep roots within the thai culture into account. so again we created treatments from scratch, by following the path of „how would a perfect treatment look like if you don‘t have to consider anything but quality?“. the next step to this aim are our treatments at zueri home massage. of course we always make modifications and improvements every day, and the „perfect treatment“ is still far away. but, how do they say so nicely, „the path is the goal“. i am happy to have You as a companion on this voyage.

as mentioned we are of course a team, without whom i would have had no chance to realise all this, with the most important person being my wife jenjirah, who in the beginning had no idea of massage at all. but throughout all the years in hotels and spas she was always „the body“ - the model all our therapists used in training. her privilege is to have worked with the very best ones only, and they all left their traces. with a brain like a computer jenjirah „recorded“ every step of each and every treatment we ever created over the years, and she is still able to recall everything at any time. this was probably the best training one can get, and so it does not come as a surprise that she (after making the necessary  but actually superfluous diploma) today is not only an outstanding therapist, but also the best trainer you can imagine, and luckily she is also a natural born healer.

staus quo:

5 of the very best therapists of some of my teams during the past 10 years are on standby in thailand, ready to come and work with me again for zueri home massage. unfortunately the AWA (department in charge of work permits for the area of zurich) denies them work permits. the reason: massage therapists are not specialists (means more or less, anybody can give massages...) - any of You who was ever able to enjoy one of our treatments know of course how incredibly ridiculous such a statement is. after years of searching and training some talented therapists we have given up - there is obviously no chance to find therapists willing or able to be trained to our level of service. for this reason jenjirah is now working all by herself only. we keep You updated.

we wish you an unforgettable massage experience...