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

Famous spas in Budapest facing the challenges of change
Andrea Nemes
Tourism Competence Center, CUB
Hungary
andrea.nemes@uni-corvinus.hu
Abstract
This paper aims at presenting the famous historical spas life cycle in Budapest in the last
years. It seeks to broach the issue of one type of the heritage of historical monuments, the spas
in Budapest and their usage in the tourism market. The paper is intended to provide an
overview of the famous historical spas, and to analyse its services in a competitive and
changing environment. The article also includes empirical findings on guest’s surveys and
interviews with the management of the spas.
Design/ methodology /approach - Comparative case studies were elaborated for the most
famous historical spas in Budapest based on secondary and primary sources. The data consists
of statistics, interviews and other documents.
Findings - Nowadays it seems to be the only way for the management of the spas in Budapest
to make innovations and improve the level of their services, and focusing not only to the
Hungarian but to the international market.
It summarizes the basic information’s, and previews ongoing innovations to the state of the art
level, to take into consideration the life cycle of the area and the products.
Keywords: national heritage conservation, competitiveness, spa tourism, product
development, life cycle of destinations, Budapest, Hungary.
Introduction
Nowadays the basic conditions of tourism and the health awareness of tourist and inhabitants
of spa cities and towns are changing. Due to economic difficulties, in view of changing travel
behaviour towards shorter and less holidays, health awareness, and strong individualization as
well as increasing quality awareness of the customers, it becomes clear that tourist
destinations face an even more difficult situation. It is the case in the spa cities and spa towns
too. Change in tourist destinations is driven by various events, institutions or actors, which
exert pressure or indicate new directions (Beritelli & Reinhold 2010). From the other hand the
changing health care system in Hungary require new conformation from the spa cities and
towns with the new planed regulation on the health mobility within the European Union.
Health tourism is one of the most visibly and rapidly developing product of domestic tourism
and is currently one of the world’s most innovative business sectors. Within the tourism sector
the development of health tourism can significantly enhance the number of guest, guest-nights
and the actual spending of guests. The spa city of Budapest has a special character and plays a
special role in this context. The development of health tourism and spas in Budapest seems to
be a good combination for wellness and cure purposes based on thermal water.
The definition of a tourism product is most often understood as a tourism destination in the
tourism literature, and looked through a tourism area life cycle point of view. In this study the