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

simplify one’s life in light of rising stress-levels and the fast pace of everyday life (Douglas,
2007; Smith & Puczkó, 2008), the Australian wellness tourism industry has grown
exponentially in the past decade. For example, Australian spa providers have experienced a
growth rate of 129 percent between 2002 and 2006 (Intelligent Spas, 2006) while more recent
data shows that the number of Australian spa facilities is still expanding despite the global
economic downturn (Intelligent Spas, 2009). Until recently, however, there has been a
“distinct lack of published research on health tourism issues in Australia” (Bennett, King, &
Milner, 2004, p. 122). Previous research has tended to focus narrowly on only one type of
wellness tourism provider or one group of wellness tourist without considering that there
might be a broader range of wellness tourism supply and demand. Consequently, a recent
Australian national scoping study aimed at defining wellness tourism in the Australian context
and investigating supply and demand. This paper focuses on the supply-side and discusses a
newly developed typology of wellness tourism providers. Based on this typology, a nationwide
survey was conducted to establish a profile of all Australian wellness tourism suppliers.
This paper provides an analysis of the services of three distinct core categories of Australian
wellness tourism providers.
A New Typology of Wellness Tourism
Apart from the apparent agreement that wellness tourism is a form of Special Interest Tourism
(SIT) (e.g. Hall, 2003; Letho et al., 2006), existing definitions and typologies vary
extensively. It seems that there is a tension between finding a broad enough typology that
acknowledges a diversity of wellness tourism supply and demand, but that is narrow enough
to enable workable data collection. For instance, very broad wellness tourism typologies such
as the one suggested by Sheldon and Bushell (2009) which includes medical tourism,
sport/fitness, adventure tourism and volunteer tourism activities may be useful in a heuristic
sense, yet are so inclusive that they limit realistic, practical application.
One area of disagreement between scholars is whether wellness tourism subsumes medical
tourism (e.g. Sheldon and Bushell, 2009), or vice-versa (e.g. Bookman & Bookman, 2007), or
alternatively whether wellness and medical tourism are two essentially separate tourism
categories. This paper supports the view that there is a theoretical difference between ‘cure’ or
‘illness’ concepts on one side and the ‘wellness’ concept on the other (Müller & Lanz
Kaufmann, 2001; Nahrstedt, 2004; Voigt, 2008). Whereas medical tourists are illness-oriented
because they primarily travel in order to cure or treat a certain illness or medical condition,
wellness tourists go on vacation in order to maintain or improve their health and well-being
and thus try to reach higher levels of wellness. Consequently, providers catering to those
differing cure- or wellness-driven needs of tourists can thus also be conceptualised as two
distinct sub-segments of health tourism suppliers (Figure 1). However, a wellness tourism
definition and typology that is purely based on this distinction in demand, is still too vague
and difficult to operationalise because tourists can improve their health and well-being in a
vast range of tourism contexts.
Another basis upon which to develop a wellness tourism typology concerns the deliberate
creation of tourist infrastructure that is specifically and primarily designed to enable and
enhance people’s health and well-being. For instance, while the supply of volunteer tourism
might evoke increased well-being of participating tourists, this type of travel is primarily
designed to provide aid for communities or assisting in environmental or cultural preservation
(Brown, 2005; Wearing, 2001). One could argue that the emphasis is the well-being of
communities or the environment rather than the well-being of the tourists. Similarly,
adventure tourism infrastructure is primarily designed to offer extreme physical challenges,