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

All models mentioned above contain some sort of component involving lifestyle or leisure
time that includes a few basic indicators related to tourism:
1. In the leisure and recreation group of the resource-based Scandinavian model we have
"the number and ratio of participants on holidays and vacation during the past year”
2. In the German model called the “Quality of life” (QOL), leisure time is paired with
media consumption
3. The English component-based approach works with the lifestyle category.
However marginally, the effect on quality of life created by tourism and travel is therefore
present in all social indicator models.
Examining the link between tourism and quality of life
Methodological dilemmas and the question of database
One can examine the link between tourism and quality of life from two aspects. First, we can
look at the individual's relationship to tourism (and the nature of involvement); second, we
can study the way that participation in the tourism sector influences the individual's subjective
well-being; we may call this the personal perception. This subject has already been dealt with
in several studies (e.g. Neal et al 2004, Michalkó et al 2009).
There is, however, a possible area of analysis arising from the assumption that people living at
frequented tourist destinations are happier than those living at areas less frequented by
tourists. This hypothesis could be justified by a specific study only, which would require
questioning an appropriate number of inhabitants of both popular and unpopular tourist
destinations about how happy they are. Existing research results on "happiness" or "subjective
well-being” used neither the kind of sampling method nor the sort of database that would be
appropriate for our research on the relationship to be investigated. What existing research may
support is only a kind of aggregate data: we may formulate some claims on individual
happiness and its correlations with various elements of life, but only on a national, possibly
regional level, and strictly along standard socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age,
education, settlement type and economic activity).
Another possible direction of research is to deduce the happiness of the inhabitants of a
settlement from the urban characteristics of their home town, and from the socio-demographic
indices of their population. In other words, we may try to measure subjective well-being at the
level of objective data, naming such an indicator system "objective quality of life". Of course
we are aware that these indicators are also influenced by a number of other mechanisms, and
that in many cases, the causal relationships may become juxtaposed. In spite of this we shall
make the attempt to either confirm or deny our hypothesis.
A further important aspect is that our model must have such a set of indicators that are easily
produced from the existing databases, thus eliminating the need for special or expensive data
surveys. According to this criterion we used the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (HCSO)
Time Use Survey 1999/2000 database and the HCSO TSTAR 2000 database for our research.
Determinants of subjective well-being
Using the theoretical basis, first we identified those areas and the range of indicators which do
affect subjective well-being of the individual. As mentioned earlier, people associate
subjective well-being or happiness with their personal micro-habitat primarily (Janky &
Lengyel 2003). Other literature (Lelkes 2003, Alesina et al 2001) show us that some factors
clearly affect the feeling of happiness. Based on the data of the HCSO Time Use Survey