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

on families. Furthermore, the availability of thermal water is no predictor for any of the
targeting strategies, neither is the size or the price level.
Broadness of wellness offers
The broadness of wellness offers was assessed by a sum score mapping how many treatments
of a pre-defined list are offered per hotel. The list was generated by a priori-reasoning as well
as by extracting and aggregating frequently mentioned treatments such as classical or Asian
massages, hot stone treatments, baths, lymph drainage, and similar. Analyzing bivariate
relationships, price level is the most marked variable to predict the broadness of offers
(moderate relationship), followed by type of ownership. Not surprisingly, higher price level
corresponds to a broader range of wellness offers. Most interestingly, all other variables
considered by now do not play an important role regarding the broadness, especially not the
availability of thermal water, and neither the addressed target group nor the size of the hotel.
A multivariate consideration reveals a particular interaction: narrow offers are typical for
hotels which are the perfect anti-type to the mountainous seasonal family-operated skiing
hotel as discussed above, which means they are frequently found in year-round hotels which
are neither family-operated nor in the mountains and not promoting skiing.
Judging from the websites, the most popular wellness offers are – apart from the more or less
ubiquitous baths or packages – Asian and classical massages, lymph drainage (all between 25
and 31 %) and hot stone treatments (14 %). Many features such as acupuncture are only
offered by very few hotels, producing an extensive list of treatments which are found in at
least one of the hotels under consideration. However, cluster analytic and factor analytic
investigation could not reveal strong characteristic profiles or typical treatment combinations;
rather the composition of offers seems idiosyncratic or, to put it bluntly, looks somewhat
arbitrary.
Broadness of beauty offers
Similarly to the broadness of wellness offers, a characteristic for the broadness of beauty
offers (facials, manicure, pedicure and similar) was defined and computed. As the most
striking result, the broadness of wellness and beauty offers show an extremely large
correlation (Spearman correlation � = 0.63, p < 0.001). This might not necessarily be due
to the real treatment situation–it probably reflects to some part the general thoroughness of
the hotel’s homepage, as well. Whatsoever, the relationship to price level is similar strong
as the one of broadness of wellness offers. There is again and even slightly closer a
connection to the mountainous seasonal family-operated skiing hotel type: generally
speaking, the more characteristics of a hotel match this type, the more beauty treatments
are offered by the websites.
The most popular beauty features are facial treatments (47 %), followed by manicure (33
%) and pedicure (31 %). Manicure and pedicure are highly interrelated (Cramer’s V =
0.950), but with much weaker links to facial treatments (V = 0.424 or 0.380, resp.).
Structure of offers
Analyzing the structure of offers emphasizes the impression that wellness often appears as
an add-on, as one feature additionally provided. For the analysis, the numbers of items
from certain pre-defined target lists were evaluated per hotel, whereby there were separate
lists for wellness treatments, beauty treatments, medical treatments, educational courses,
training courses and promoted activities (such as sports outside the hotel). The largest
correlation was between beauty and wellness treatments (Spearman correlation � = 0.63,
p < 0.001), whereas numbers of wellness and medical treatments only showed � = 0.28 (p
= 0.001). The mere size of the hotel (operationalized by the number of rooms) didn’t seem