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

As expected, Day Spas and Beauty Spa Hotels/Resorts are more likely to provide beauty body
treatments (i.e. body scrubs and wraps), facials, manicure and pedicure than Lifestyle Resorts
and Spiritual Retreats. In fact, Spiritual Retreats almost never provide body and beauty
treatments.
Lifestyle Resorts are more likely to offer nutrition-based services, general health assessments,
private and group counselling, as well as complementary and alternative therapies (CAM)
than the other categories of wellness service providers. Although only a few respondents
specified what kind of CAM therapies they offer, therapies mentioned included Traditional
Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, kinesiology, iridology, naturopathy, homeopathy, bachflower
consults, Feldenkrais, Bowen therapy, hypnotherapy, and psychic or crystal healing.
Unsurprisingly, all Spiritual Retreats offered meditation and they were much more likely to
offer meditation and spiritual or religious teachings than all the other types of wellness service
providers. The fact that 19% of Day Spas offered meditation is a surprising result, as a
previous assessment of spa menus did not appear to include such a service. Perhaps
respondents sought to offer visitors a personal meditative state rather than a guided
meditation. This suggests a blurriness between some of these categories of providers that is
worthy of exploration in future research. Although only some respondents specified the type
of meditation they used, different meditation techniques ranged from Vipassana or Buddhist
meditation, Dru meditation, Raja yoga, visualisation, breath awareness, mindfulness,
Holosync, transcendental meditation, sound meditation, chanting mantra, Kirtan Kriya, chakra
meditation, walking meditation, ‘calming the minds/opening the heart’, and ‘loving kindness’.
It also should be noted that 90% of all providers offered massages, making them overall the
most often provided wellness service. Massage therapies and techniques respondents specified
ranged from remedial or deep tissue, relaxation massages, Thai, Swedish,
Balinese/Indonesian, Lomi Lomi, Kodo, Shiatsu, Tibetian energetic massage, sports massage,
hot stone, bamboo, cupping, lymphatic draining, ear candling, pregnancy/pre-natal massage,
and aromatherapy.
Finally, Lifestyle Resorts and Spiritual Retreats are also more likely to offer specific diets
(most often mentioned menus were vegetarian, vegan, raw foods, and/or organic) than Day
Spas and Beauty Spa Hotels/Resorts.
Discussion and Conclusions
This paper started with a discussion of a new typology of wellness tourism providers. It was
argued that existing typologies often tended to be too broad to meaningfully enable the
collection of data and compare different groups of wellness tourists or wellness tourism
providers. However, a too narrow typology would fail to recognise the diversity of
experiences wellness tourism providers offer to tourists.
The results from this research show that the three core groups of wellness providers are
distinctly different from each other, specifically in regard to the kinds of services and facilities
they offer. Despite these differences in service offerings it is nevertheless argued that the three
different core types of wellness tourism providers should not be perceived as completely
separate categories. Instead they can be better portrayed as distributed along a continuum
where there is a gradual distinction between the three types (Figure 2). For instance, some
Lifestyle Resorts put a heavy emphasis on beauty treatments and massages, whereas others
accentuate meditation and breathing techniques or ‘new age’ services such as psychic