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

Figure 1: Number of hotels in different surroundings
Surrounding
region of
the hotel
Table 3: Thermal springs and surroundings
Thermal
spring
no yes Total
City centre 4 1 5
Suburb 3 0 3
Mountainous
area
77 13 90
Lake/River 14 2 16
Countryside 9 8 17
Total 107 24 131
Not surprisingly, skiing possibilities are strongly related to mountainous surrounding, where
57% of the hotels praise alpine sport options on their homepages. At the same time, there is
also increased seasonality in mountainous surroundings and accordingly as well for skiingoffering
hotels. Skiing promotion is particularly popular in family-owned seasonal hotels
(71%), but less popular in chain-owned, year-round hotels (26%; in the other types the share
is about 50:50, which creates in a significant relationship between skiing focus and operator, p
= 0.002). This reflects the fact that in mountainous areas family-owned hotels dominate much
more clearly (71%) than in other regions (53%), which stresses the importance of seasonal
family-operated mountainous skiing hotels in the Austrian wellness sector. The centrality of
this combination is not only supported by cluster analytical considerations but also by
configuration frequency analysis: In fact, 23 hotels show all 4 properties literally, whereas 16
show none of them which forms a clearly significant type (expected value for having all 4
properties under independence assumption would be 9.5, p < 0.001).
Unlike the promotion of skiing activities, the availability of thermal water is not visibly linked
with any of the other structural characteristics as mentioned thus far.