Italy has been named the world's top spa destination in the 12th World Spa Awards, with three Italian properties taking headline prizes for 2026. The results were voted by spa industry professionals and everyday spa-goers around the globe.
The biggest Italian winner was Lefay Spa World at Lefay Resort and Spa Dolomiti, which took the title of world's best resort spa. It's a serious bit of kit: 5,000 square metres of wellness space set in the mountains, with nine saunas running different temperature and humidity combinations, organised into five guided circuits. Add indoor and outdoor pools — including a magnesium-salt whirlpool — plus massages, phytotherapy, Qi Gong and meditation woven into the experience.
The award for the world's best wellness retreat went to Palazzo Fiuggi, a medical facility in central Italy that pairs holistic traditions with Western clinical medicine. Guests get personalised programmes that can include cryotherapy, IV drips and blood analysis, alongside saunas, sound healing and light therapy. This is the end of the wellness spectrum for people who want their holiday prescribed by doctors, not just a nice massage.
Tuscany's Grotta Giusti completed the Italian hat-trick as the world's best grotto spa. Its thermal waters sit inside a cave roughly a thousand years old — the largest thermal cave of its kind in Europe — so you can literally soak in geothermal steam surrounded by rock.
New York isn't letting Europe have it all its own way. The Guerlain Wellness Spa at the Waldorf Astoria won world's best hotel spa for 2026: a recently renovated 22,000-square-foot space with exclusive massages, a sauna, a steam room and an Arctic cave. And World Spa New York took the world's best day spa title, offering an unusually global menu of bathing traditions — Eastern European banyas, Finnish saunas, Turkish and Moroccan hammams and Japanese onsens — spread across 70 treatment rooms. It's the kind of place where you can tour the world's bathing cultures in a single afternoon without leaving Manhattan.
Why it matters: if a spa trip has been sitting on your wish list, this list doubles as a shortlist vetted by thousands of voters. Italy's wins show the country isn't just about food and ruins — its thermal spa tradition stretches back to Roman times, and the modern offerings now span everything from rustic mountain sauna circuits to full medical programmes. The Dolomiti resort suits travellers who want wellness bolted onto an alpine holiday; Palazzo Fiuggi is for those after a proper health reset; Grotta Giusti works as a Tuscan culture trip with a steam cave thrown in. And the New York winners give city-breakers an excuse to book a treatment alongside the museums.
World Spa Awards managing director Rebecca Cohen framed the winners as setting the benchmark for excellence and innovation in an industry that keeps growing — useful reassurance when a top-tier spa stay can cost a small fortune and you want to know you're spending it well.
