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

Conscious or trendy? How do fashions and trends influence consumer’s
selection criteria in health-related tourism?
Krisztina Priszinger – Katalin Formádi – Peter Mayer
University of Pannonia
8200 Veszprém, Egyetem u. 10.
priszinger@turizmus.uni-pannon.hu
Abstract
With the raising preferences of being healthy, fit, environmentally sensitive, wellness became
more popular in our societies. This loosely defined term includes desirable ends such as a
dynamic lifestyle, mental and physical harmony, but also the means enabling the achievement
of the ends: services related to spending leisure time and holiday actively. Wellness became a
diversified and a holistic product which might be a key component to a long-term health and
wellness.
Wellness – beside being aimed in everyday life – also constitutes a motivation for a certain
type of tourism: the health and wellness tourist product. This can take various forms,
including both indoor and outdoor activities, taking place in spas, wellness hotels or even in
rural settings. A key trend in Western European destinations, medical wellness can still be
considered as a niche market in Central-and Eastern Europe. Suppliers are mostly underinformed
on the exact content of medical wellness and the needs of medical-wellness tourists.
As a consequence, the actual supply does not fit yet this demand.
On the other hand, we can appoint that the demand for traditional wellness-tourism plays an
important role in this region. Demand for wellness tourism is based on the generally
increasing importance of health-awareness and health-related lifestyle.
The focus of this paper is first, to identify trends and meta-trends in the media that may
influence consumer’s decision making. This part of the research is based on content analysis
of life-style print magazines and home pages. The secondary research is extended with
quantitative research based on a questionnaire carried out among spa visitors in one of the
most known Hungarian spa, in Zalakaros to point out the level of health-consciousness. The
targeted sample size is around 300 visitors. With that we examined whether visiting spas and
spending holidays in wellness hotels are “just” a trendy way of travelling or a healthconscious
step towards a healthier lifestyle. With that the study will examine the level of
health-consciousness from various perspectives. In reference to the actual product consumed
we discuss the facilities used, as well as the individual time spent on wellness services.
Furthermore, we investigate visitors’ decision making paying attention to the selection criteria
they apply as well as the general importance of this criteria in their everyday life.
Meaning of wellness
With the trends towards a greater preference for of being healthy, fit, environmentally
sensitive, wellness became more popular in our societies. Wellness has various meanings for
many people but it refers to the feeling of wholeness and health. Generally wellness is related
to the physical condition of a person as people’s aim is to achieve a good health condition and
minimize the risk of illnesses. Nevertheless wellness goes far beyond physical condition or
health. Certainly it starts with the physical health (doing exercises, cooking healthier,
consuming organic food etc.) but extends to other areas of people’s lives. From a holistic