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

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to have an influence on these correlations <strong>and</strong> can be ruled out as relevant confounder.<br />

The factor analytical structure (Table 4) based on two components (with 57 % explained<br />

variance) splits these variables into one group stressing wellness, beauty <strong>and</strong> promoted<br />

activities, <strong>and</strong> one stressing medical treatments <strong>and</strong> educational courses. Training courses<br />

somehow range in between.<br />

Table 4: Factorial structure of offers<br />

Factor loadings<br />

Factor Factor<br />

1 2<br />

<strong>Wellness</strong><br />

treatments<br />

0.78 0.24<br />

Beauty treatments 0.83 0.11<br />

Medical treatments 0.09 0.71<br />

Educational<br />

courses<br />

-0.05 0.79<br />

Training courses 0.49 0.47<br />

Promoted activities 0.62 -0.22<br />

A multidimensional scaling visualization (based on z-st<strong>and</strong>ardized values) points out the<br />

similarity between wellness <strong>and</strong> beauty in the sample very drastically, in a two-dimensional<br />

mapping of the 6 characteristics the numbers of wellness <strong>and</strong> beauty offers are immediate<br />

neighbors to each other, whereas the distance between wellness <strong>and</strong> medical offers is much<br />

larger (Table 5). An illustrative example may be the presence of nutrition courses which<br />

correlates moderately with the number of medical treatments (� = 0.231, p = 0.007) but close<br />

to zero with the number of wellness or beauty treatments.<br />

Table 5: Configuration of offers in a two-dimensional space<br />

Indeed, the contrast between wellness/beauty/activities vs. medical treatments/educational<br />

courses as indicated by factor analysis can be related to other characteristics of the hotels. A<br />

linear regression analysis identified three predictors for a wide offer of “soft” applications<br />

(wellness <strong>and</strong> beauty area): being family-operated, promoting skiing <strong>and</strong> being expensive<br />

(adjusted r² = 0.13, p < 0.001;<br />

Table 6). Accordingly, broadness of wellness <strong>and</strong> beauty offers is specific for family-operated<br />

hotels which promote other activities such as skiing as well – <strong>and</strong> which have high room rates.

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