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

Conclusion and discussion
The aim of the paper is to test the model by Sheldon and Park in Savonlinna by examining an
urban destination, Savonlinna town and its surroundings from the perspective of
competitiveness in the context of wellbeing tourism. The overall finding of the interviews is
that Savonlinna was perceived as a destination product. In addition there was much discussion
on Savonlinna’s assets for wellbeing tourism. However, the interviewees pointed out that in
practice there is still much to be done to achieve the status for Savonlinna town of a
sustainable wellbeing tourism destination. At the moment, such status is more in the minds of
respondents than on a tangible, practical level. As noted earlier in the case of one
rehabilitation centre (see Tuohino & Kangas 2008) one of the greatest challenges for
wellbeing tourism is opportunity. Currently the wellbeing segment in Savonlinna region is
still limited and fragmentary.
Lakes were seen as the town’s main resource. However, the use of lakes in the wellbeing
context was difficult for the interviewees to envisage. Among the interviewees there was a
strong vision of wellbeing tourism development around the lakes but the main question was
how in practice to exploit lakes in tourism product development.
For some reason, none of the interviewees mentioned the strategies while describing the
frameworks of Savonlinna in the wellbeing context in spite of existing national, regional and
local tourism development strategies giving the guidelines. In general it was apparent in the
interviews that the interviewees analyzed Savonlinna as a tourism destination, not as a
wellbeing tourism destination. As one interviewee said “Savonlinna is an underachiever
compared to resources available”.
However, it emerged that the model by Sheldon and Park can indeed be implemented in the
case of Savonlinna and used in evaluating the attributes of the town. According to the
findings presented in this paper there is still a lot of work to be done before Savonlinna can
really be seen as a sustainable wellbeing tourism destination. Therefore this paper presents the
first phase of the process.
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