Health, Wellness and Tourism: healthy tourists, healthy business ...

health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being”, which reflects a
preventive way of living that reduces, and even eliminates, the need for remedies. Thus,
health tourism refers to someone who has one or more medical conditions that would make
him travel to experience therapies that help to make him well - or to improve his health. On
the other hand, the concept of wellness emphasizes personal responsibility for making lifestyle
choices and self care decisions that will improve our quality of life. People who engage
in wellness tourism are generally healthy, but seek therapies to maintain this state of wellbeing.
While Europeans and Asians have recognized the benefits of “taking the waters” for
centuries, and the concept of “wellness” has been recognized as a major force in the United
States for more almost 20 years, it has really been part of the Canadian consciousness for only
about 10 years. In that time, however, a significant change in attitudes has taken place.
Methods
One of the first comprehensive assessments of travel behaviour and motivators, including
interest in vacations at health spas, was the Travel Activities & Motivation Survey (TAMS),
completed in 1999, and repeated in 2006. For both studies, Statistics Canada undertook the
survey of Canadians, using random digit dialing to obtain samples stratified by census
metropolitan area (CMA). The samples were restricted to all persons aged 18 years of age and
older in the ten Canadian provinces and full-time residents of institutions were excluded.
Travellers who took an out-of-town trip of one or more nights in the past two years were
identified via the screening telephone interview.
In 1999, the telephone survey was completed by 18,385 individuals. Respondents were
selected randomly within the household. 24,635 qualified for the mailback questionnaire. Of
these 5,490 (35.2 %) returned the questionnaire. Using gender, age, education level and
income, responses were weighted to project the results to the national level. 2.4% (470,853
when weighted to the population) of Canadians (as compared to 4% of Americans) had stayed
at a health spa during the past two years. This survey also asked about travel intentions in the
next two years, and identified 6.7% (1,314,463 of the population) of respondents as
expressing an interest in visiting a health spa.
In 2006, the telephone survey was completed by 53,150 individuals and a total of 24,692
(53.5%) travelers completed the mail-back survey questionnaires. This survey contained two
activity variables of interest: “Day visit to a health spa and wellness spa while on a trip of one
or more nights" and “staying at a health spa”. For each variable, it was possible to choose
either “On out-of-town trips of one or more nights in past 2 years” or “Main reason for taking
any of these trips”. Among 24,692 Canadian overnight travellers, 2,538 made a day visit and
1,426 stayed at a health spa. When weighted to the Canadian population (Statistics Canada,
2006), it was determined that 11.0% or over 2.23 million of Canadian overnight travelers
visited a health and wellness spa and/or stayed at a spa resort while on an out-of-town,
overnight trip of one or more nights.
In addition to analysis of the weighted data using frequency, chi-square and analysis of
variances techniques, the odds ratio was used as a measure of association. Due to the large
sample size, all results were significant at the 0.001 level or better.