Wellness Tourism Management: Well-Being as a Sustainability Concern for Wellness Tourism Management

Introduction

This chapter aims to provide a better understanding of wellness tourism management for the professionals and scholars of the tourism industry. The most important concern of wellness tourism is making people ‘feel well’. Wellness tourism is only an option among other possibilities of recreational tourism products that people may prefer while spending their disposable income. Additionally, suppliers of wellness tourism strive to become prominent in a very competitive market. To be able to attract the clientele depends on a much better understanding of the consumer needs for wellness tourism. Mastering what you offer as products is another important aspect. But even all these considerations are not enough for the professionals to define well their game field as a distinctive player in the sector. The key to good management of wellness tourism for the production quality, creativity and sales improvement is through deeply understanding your customer. Many researches are carried out for this aim. Among the studies exploring the supply side of wellness tourism are: Pyke et all (2016), Nagy (2014), Csirmaz & Pető (2015). Among the studies made for the exploration of the demand side of wellness tourism are Gustavo (2010), Konu & Laukanen (2010), Dimitrovski & Todorovic (2015). The current wellness and spa tourism will be analyzed through similar examples of academic literature and sectoral information about the current business and market trends.

Wellness market is a very important industry with a $4,2 Trillion according to the Global Wellness Trends Report 2019 (Global Wellness Summit, 2019). Wellness tourism is gaining acceptance as an innovative way to practice, maintain, or enhance good health in this market. The GWI (Global Wellness Institute) projects that wellness tourism market representing $639 billion today will grow at an average annual rate of 7.5 per cent through 2022, considerably faster than the 6.4 per cent annual growth forecasted for overall global tourism market and expected to reach by 2022 to $900 billion. Additionally, the visitors will increase by 8 per cent and realize as $1,2 billion (Global Wellness Institute, 2018). Even if the initial investment is high, wellness resorts have a high ROI (Return on Investment) as they increase occupancy levels of hotels in low and shoulder seasons thus being a good remedy for seasonality. Additionally, they exhibit considerably higher RevPAR (35 per cent to 450 per cent) than the traditional resort at the same locations with similar service standards (Schweder, 2019)

Beyond the World Health Organization’s description of health as 'a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity', studies on conceptualisations of wellness and well-being continue. Any definition apart one is not complete as they considered the health of people separated from its surroundings. As people live in a social and natural environment, there is a need for a broader description. Inspired by Bodeker and Cohen (2010: 8), conceptualisation of well-being according to a more holistic point of view includes being healthy not only biologically or physically but also in all aspects of mind, body and spirit and living harmoniously with all the environmental surroundings, thus seizing the day in harmony with inner and outer world. This means that well-being is a more complex concept that requires a deeper analysis to be defined in the context of holistic health.