If part of your job is looking after a team — as an HR manager, an office manager, or simply the person everyone turns to when morale needs a lift — you will know how hard it is to find a wellbeing gesture that people genuinely value. Most of what gets offered is well meant but forgettable. This page explains what we offer teams and employers around Wilmslow, how the £50 tax-free voucher rule works, and how to arrange everything with one email.
Float Therapy Wilmslow is an independent studio on Chapel Lane, in the middle of Wilmslow. We offer float therapy, contrast therapy and massage, we are open 9am to 9pm every day, and we have more than 350 five-star reviews from the people who visit us. We are a small business, not a corporate wellness provider, and we think that is exactly why this works.
Why real rest beats another pizza lunch
There is nothing wrong with a pizza lunch, a branded water bottle or a lunchtime webinar on resilience. But none of it gives busy people the thing they are usually shortest of: genuine, uninterrupted rest.
A visit here is an hour of enforced quiet. No phone, no notifications, no one needing anything. For a lot of people, it is the first proper pause they have had in months — and it is the kind of gesture that gets talked about in the office afterwards, because it feels like being looked after rather than being managed.
We keep our promises grounded — no invented productivity percentages or the inflated claims that fill so much wellbeing marketing. We would rather be straight with you. What we can say is that guests regularly tell us they leave feeling more rested than they have in a long time, and that a surprising number of first-time visitors — often people who came on a voucher someone else bought them — come back on their own.
What a visit involves
Three things happen here, and each stands on its own as a gift or a reward.
- Float therapy — a 60-minute session in a spacious private pod filled with warm, Epsom-salt-rich water. You lie back, the salt holds you at the surface, and there is nothing to do but rest. Allow around 90 minutes for the full visit. Read about float therapy, or see what a first float is actually like.
- Contrast therapy — an infrared sauna paired with an ice bath, moving between heat and cold at your own pace, available as solo or duo sessions. Read about contrast therapy.
- Massage — hands-on treatments with Jade, our massage therapist: aromatherapy, body sculpting, deep tissue, Indian head and lymphatic drainage massage. Read about massage.
Every room is private with its own shower, and free on-street parking is available on Chapel Lane and the surrounding roads. Being open 9am to 9pm daily means staff can visit before work, in a long lunch, or on the way home.
The £50 tax-free voucher, explained
Here is the part most employers have never been told about.
HMRC's trivial benefits exemption lets you give employees small non-cash gifts — including vouchers for services like ours — completely tax-free, provided each gift costs £50 or less. Within that rule:
- there is no PAYE or National Insurance to pay on the gift
- there is no P11D reporting to do
- the gift must not be cash (a voucher for a service is fine)
The full conditions are set out on GOV.UK, and directors of close companies have an annual cap of £300 in trivial benefits, but for a straightforward staff thank-you the mechanics really are that simple. As with anything involving tax, a quick word with your accountant is sensible before you build a scheme around it.
What makes it work particularly well here is that our prices fit neatly under the line. A single float is £48 and a solo contrast session is £40 — so a voucher covering a full session sits within the £50 limit. Our gift cards are sold online in any value you choose, emailed instantly, and valid for twelve months, so the person you are thanking can book whenever suits them.
In practice: a £48 gift card per employee is an hour of genuine rest each, given entirely tax-free, with no benefit-in-kind paperwork. Compare that with putting the same money through payroll, and the appeal is obvious.
Ways teams use us
There is no fixed corporate package, because teams use us in quite different ways. These are the patterns we see most often.
Individual thank-yous. Someone has carried a difficult project, covered a colleague's leave, or simply had a hard few months. A gift card, emailed the same day, lands very differently from a line in an all-hands email.
Monthly or quarterly wellbeing allowances. Some businesses give staff a regular wellbeing budget and let them choose how to spend it. Floats, contrast sessions and massage all qualify as things people actually look forward to using, and our pricing page covers single sessions, packages and memberships if staff want to make it a habit.
Pairs booking contrast side by side. Our contrast therapy duo sessions let two colleagues take on the sauna and ice bath together. It is a genuinely memorable shared experience — more so than most team-building formats — and the ice bath tends to generate stories that outlast the session.
Post-project resets. When a team has just shipped something big, a block of gift cards says thank you in a way that also acknowledges what the push cost people — a quieter alternative to the celebratory night out, and one that everyone can actually use.
New-starter and milestone gestures. A voucher in a welcome pack, or to mark a work anniversary, gives people a reason to step away from their desk that they might never have given themselves.
Minutes from AstraZeneca, Alderley Park and Waters
Wilmslow sits in the middle of a busy stretch of Cheshire. AstraZeneca's Macclesfield campus, Alderley Park and Waters Corporation are all roughly twenty minutes from the studio, and plenty of smaller firms — agencies, practices, professional services — are based in and around Wilmslow itself.
To be clear, we have no formal ties with any of these employers; they are simply nearby, which matters when you are asking busy people to fit something new into a working week. Being open 9am to 9pm every day helps too: staff can book a session around the working day rather than giving up part of a weekend for it.
We are also in the process of joining workplace wellbeing platforms. If your company runs one and you would like to know where things stand, ask us directly and we will give you a straight answer.
How to arrange it
There is no form to fill in and nothing to sign up to. Email reception@float-therapy.co.uk or call 07810 145975 and tell us what you have in mind — one voucher or fifty, a one-off thank-you or a standing monthly arrangement.
We will handle the rest: gift cards in whatever values you need, emailed to you or directly to your staff. If you are not sure what would suit your team best, say so — we are happy to talk it through, and to answer the practical questions people usually ask, from what to bring to how booking works.
If you would rather see the place before committing, come in for a session yourself first — you would be very welcome, and it is the quickest way to know whether it will suit your team.
A quieter kind of perk
Corporate wellbeing does not need to be loud to be real. An hour of genuine rest, given tax-free, arranged with one email — that is the whole offer. If that sounds like something your team would value, get in touch and we will make it easy.