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

therapies such as Feldenkrais, acupuncture, naturopathy and hypnotherapy. Both Golden Door
resorts also include a beauty spa where guests can book beauty treatments at an additional
cost. Program guests have three fixed meal times built into their program structure. The
cuisine offered at the Golden Door consists of low fat, wholesome meals without added salt
and sugar. Furthermore, alcohol, non-herbal teas and coffee are not allowed on the premises
and the resort is a smoking-free zone. Amenities such as television, Internet and telephones
are not offered and the use of mobile phones is discouraged and not permitted outside of the
guest’s room.
The emphasis of Spiritual Retreats is on spiritual development or enlightenment. Spiritual
retreats can be religious or non-religious but always include meditation in various forms.
Many spiritual retreats are based on some specific teachings or philosophy and/or focus on the
study of a specific activity such as yoga, T’ai Chi or Reiki or particular meditation techniques.
Like lifestyle resorts, some spiritual retreats also focus on detoxing and fasting. Here,
however, this often has a distinct spiritual note in terms of ‘purification’ or ‘cleansing’ and
not only in regard to weight loss or getting rid of unhealthy toxins. Additionally, one can also
distinguish ‘non-silent’ and ‘silent’ Spiritual Retreats. In ‘silent’ spiritual retreats, participants
are not allowed to talk to each other the entire time; they are supposed to focus entirely on
their personal spiritual journey. Compared to Beauty Spa Hotel/Resorts and Lifestyle Resorts,
the interior design and facilities of Spiritual Retreats tend to be more basic and participants
often have to share austere rooms and/or bathroom facilities. Guests are also often expected to
participate in housekeeping activities, such as washing the dishes after meals. The food
offered in Spiritual Retreats is often vegetarian or vegan and alcohol is generally not
permitted.
The majority of Australian Spiritual Retreats are based on or influenced by Asian
philosophies and meditation techniques. Examples are the week-end or short monastic retreats
that are regularly organised at the Nan Tien Temple in Wollongong, New South Wales. The
Nan Tien Temple is the largest Buddhist Temple in the Southern hemisphere, run by nuns
from the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist order. The temple complex incorporates two prayer halls
including shrines five Big Buddha statues, 100.000 small Buddha statues, a gong and a drum,
an eight-storey pagoda, a museum, a tea house, a library and a conference centre, all set
amidst landscaped gardens which include a lotus pond. There is also housing for nuns and
monks as well as the ‘Pilgrim Lodge’, where retreat participants and other visitors stay.
Retreat participants, or ‘students’ wear traditional grey, monastic garb during their stay and
men are required to shave their heads for longer retreats. Students are expected to partake in
the normal temple life which also includes morning chanting sessions at 6 a.m. and are also
required to observe ‘Noble Silence’. Vegetarian meals, cooked with food donated to the
temple, are served in the public dining hall. Some Nan Tien Temple retreats provide students
with a theoretical approach to learning and understanding Buddhism whereas others teach
several meditation techniques, including sitting meditation, walking meditation, tea
meditation and T’ai Chi.
Database Analysis
The final data base consisted of 590 service providers, categorised into 201 spa hotel/resorts,
262 day spas, 28 lifestyle resorts, 83 spiritual retreats and 16 hybrids (businesses that could
not be definitely classified on the database information alone).
Thus, the majority of businesses in our database consisted of day spa businesses, even though
there was no intention to achieve a complete Australian census for this wellness provider