Save your money, the €3–5k tub comes with the same service
I bought a Hot Spring Aria for €18,000 from Status Wellness, the official Hot Spring distributor in Portugal. The main reason to pay this much instead of €3–5k for a regular tub is supposed to be the brand: proper guidance, proactive support, someone who has your back. That's the pitch. The reality: there is no difference. All the support is reactive at best. Nobody walks you through the maintenance, nobody reminds you what to replace and when, nobody checks in. At installation we got only generic instructions, and we had to discover the actual maintenance requirements ourselves, the hard way. We even ended up writing our own maintenance guide. US customer service twice promised their European team would contact us. Nobody ever did. And nowhere in the sales process are you told the real running costs, roughly three cartridges plus a sensor every year. The tub itself is fine. But you're paying €18,000 for a support experience that simply doesn't exist. If you're going to figure everything out yourself anyway, do it with a €3–5k tub.
By Konstantin K.