Geoff Sherr couldn't believe his luck when he recently checked into the new Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica, Calif. The hotel had its very own spa, which its brochure promised would make his life's cares "simply float away."

Then he pressed the "Spa" floor button on the elevator -- and discovered it wasn't a spa floor at all. It was a gym, with four treatment rooms squeezed into a corner and only two staff members on duty. Nobody, he recalls, offered him a robe or a locker for his $85 massage, which he says was cut short. "I wouldn't even call it a spa," the public-relations executive says.
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