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

Target groups
As shown in Figure 2, the most frequently directly addressed target populations are families
and couples. Correlation structure together with multidimensional scaling (Figure 3) suggests
to group the strategies into single/couples/wellness, business/conferences/50+ and families.
The vertical dimension might be interpreted as tranquility, the horizontal one as
representativeness. The correlations between the targeting families and other groups are very
small indicating that addressing families is independent from addressing the other targets.
There is in general no visible tendency to specialize on particular groups exclusively.
Figure 2: Target groups
A remarkable dominance of family orientation can be noted which is striking because the
classical wellness hotel would not be expected to focus on families. A context analysis of web
pages, on the other hand, reveals that many of the hotels seem to emphasize feeling well and
relaxing more than undergoing distinguished treatments, and the wellness section is not
central there but one among many others. In fact, hotels which target families offer
significantly less items from a pre-defined list of medical treatments (0.6 instead of 1.0,
Mann-Whitney p = 0.04, one-tailed), whereas there are no statistically relevant differences
regarding wellness or beauty treatments, courses, trainings or promoted activities.
Figure 3: Configuration of target groups in a two-dimensional space
What can be observed in the data is that families are particularly targeted in mountainous
areas (especially Salzburg, the Tyrol and Carinthia), whereas there is hardly any business
orientation in family-operated hotels (3 out of 64 (!) family-operated, 10 out of 36 other).
Similarly, family-owners seem to concentrate less on seminars and conferences. Most
interestingly, there seems to be no direct relationship between being family-run and focusing