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

Analysis and classification of wellness hotels in Austria
Ivo Ponocny, Dagmar Lund-Durlacher
MODUL University Vienna, Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Wien, Austria
dagmar.lund-durlacher@modul.ac.at
ivo.ponocny@modul.ac.at
Abstract
Austrian wellness hotel web pages have been analyzed on the basis of a random sample of
134 hotels enumerated in the Relax Wellness Guide. Dominant features were found to be
mountainous surroundings, being operated by independents and promoting non-wellness
activities such as skiing as well. Surprisingly many enterprises focus on families as the target
population, especially in mountainous areas. Quite often there is no particular distinguished
wellness specialization, but wellness is taken as an add-on to other options or activities.
Correspondingly, wellness offers are much closer tied to beauty offers than to genuine
medical treatments, which allow discriminating between a “soft” and “hard” profile, whereby
the former emphasizes relaxing and feeling well and the latter more specific health-related
treatments. Alternative medicine is applied in almost half of the hotels, with a strong tendency
that hotels which offer alternative medicine offer beauty treatments as well. However,
sophisticated concepts of wellness or characteristic profiles are lacking in most cases.
Background
Wellness is a worldwide trend which in the year 2010 led to around 900 health and wellness
hotels in Austria. There are 28 thermal baths with 6.75 billion visitors per year as well as 200
private hospitals and rehabilitation centers. About 12 percent of all tourists in Austria make
health-oriented holidays (ABA Invest in Austria).
Wellness offers in Austria differ widely and there is no clear categorization for the consumer
of what to expect from the variety of wellness hotels. Being still a young concept, health and
wellness tourism lacks commonly recognized definitions and categorizations. Inspired by a
study of Mueller and Lanz-Kaufmann (Müller, Lanz-Kaufmann 2001), which analyzed the
wellness hotel market in Switzerland and revealed four types of wellness hotels there, the
need for investigating the wellness supply in Austria was seen by the researchers.
Research question
The aim of the project is to discover and define different categories of the health and wellness
accommodation sector by analyzing health and wellness establishments in Austria with a
predefined set of criteria which can be used for classification of the health and wellness
supply market.
Characteristics of interest are formal ones such as hotel category, location, ownership, price,
size, properties and general hotel facilities as well as the core marketing concept and the
target groups addressed explicitly or implicitly. The main focus of interest lies on the health
and wellness facilities which are advertised and on the detailed list of health and wellness
offers (treatments, therapies, packages, trainings, courses, retail areas). Another area of
inquiry refers to the promised effects of the wellness supply offered (such as mitigation or
improvement, relaxation, spiritual experience, beauty), and to the promises connected with
this supply. The fundamental concept behind the orientation of the treatments shall be
assessed and analyzed in the context of available natural resources, unique selling position