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

Tourists’ satisfaction, leisure involvement and health benefit of special interest
tourism: health and well-being tourism
Ching-Cheng Shen
The Graduate School of Travel Management. National Kaohsiung Hospitality College,
Taiwan
sccheng1202@hotmail.com
Tzuhui A. Tseng
Department of Environmental and Cultural Resources. National Hsinchu University of
Education, Taiwan
thtseng@mail.nhcue.edu.tw
Abstract
Due to the increasing stress from life and work, it has become an important issue for modern
people to release stress and pursuit health in everyday life and leisure time. This has boosted
the development of health and well-being tourism activities. Taitung County is located at the
east side of Taiwan. It neighbors the Pacific Ocean, and is a beautiful and vigorous
environment with green mountains, rushing water, and fresh air. It has been promoted as the
spiritual homeland of Taiwan, and is a good place to develop health and well-being tourism.
To raise its unique attraction in tourism activities, special interest tourism has become more
and more favored by the general public. Da-Muo Yijin Kung is a special kung-fu
Bodhidharma (Da-Muo) created to enhance health and prevent sickness through a series of
exercises. Therefore, how to integrate health and well-being into special interest tourism, in
order to create a unique attraction of health and well-being tourism is a subject that is worth
looking into. This study took the relationship among satisfaction, behavior involvement, and
health effectiveness of special interest health and well-being tourism activities as research
topic, and chose visitors who were at Jing-Mei Villa in Taitung County to learn Da-Muo Yijin
Kung as research subjects. Through survey interviews and empirical analysis, the findings
were as following: 1. On the satisfaction aspect of special interest health and well-being
tourism activities, fresh air, healthy food, Ganoderma tea, owner’s warm hospitality, dining
procedure and moving meditation were the higher scored factors. 2. For health effectiveness,
improve physical health, enhance resistance against disease and delay ageing were the higher
scored factors. 3. On the aspect of behavior involvement, learning devotion and earnestness,
learning time and frequency were the higher scored factors. 4. Through factor analysis, factor
dimensions extracted from satisfaction of special interest health and well-being tourism
activities included health tourism, learning activities of Da-Muo Yijin Kung, healthy diet,
healthy environment, and healthy product; factor dimensions of health effectiveness included
health and self-confidence. 5. To analyze the relationships among satisfaction, behavior
involvement, and health effectiveness of special interest health and well-being tourism
activities, this study developed a linear structural equation, and the result showed: satisfaction
had positive relation to behavior involvement and health effectiveness; behavior involvement
had positive relation to health effectiveness; behavior involvement was and intervening
variable for satisfaction to influence health effectiveness. 6. On the satisfaction aspect of
tourism activities, the learning activities of Da-Muo Yijin Kung and health tourism were
important factor dimensions; on the health effectiveness aspect, health and self-confidence
were both important factor dimensions. The above result showed that by integrating special