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

the real market. Little research has looking on the elderly market and from this perspective.
The specific goals of the research are to explore the elders’ wellness travel market, to identify
the clusters by perceived travel benefits among the elderly, to analyze the demographic
background, travel experience, and their health perception and behavior in different clusters,
to explore their perceived importance of wellness hotel services and facilities in different
clusters, and to compare the participation interests of extended wellness-related activities of
travel in different clusters.
Literature Review
The focus of the study is on the perceived travel benefits of the older adults for wellness
market and its correlation with some variables of hotel wellness-related services. Thus, the
concepts of wellness tourism, wellness hotel services and facilities, and the characteristics of
travelers for wellness tourism will be discussed.
Definition of Wellness and Wellness Tourism
Halbert Dunn (1959) wrote about a special state of great personal health contentment which
consists of an overall sense of well-being. He used “high-level wellness” to describe the state
which sees human as a harmony of body, spirit and mind and being dependent on their
environment. The term “wellness” was also mentioned by Ardell (1977, 1986), Travis (1984),
Benson & Suart (1992), Greenbert & Dintiman (1997), and Myers, Sweeney & Witner (2005)
in their health-related publications. Hertel (1992) of the German Wellness Association
reviewing the definitions of wellness in USA found it shared certain common characteristics:
lifestyle is of critical importance, self-responsibility for health, the multi-factorial roots of
health as well as the exploitation of our potential for a better quality of life.
In a sense, the wellness tourism can be been seen as a part of the health tourism (Mueller &
Kaufmann, 2001; Harahseh, 2002). The authors borrowed the definition of wellness
developed by Mueller and Kaufmann (2001) who defined wellness tourism as “the sum of all
the relationships and phenomena resulting from a journey and residence by people whose
main motive is to preserve or promote their health” to focus on the related wellness services
and facilities provided by the hotel in the journey.
Definitions of Benefits and Travel Benefits.
The Oxford Dictionary (2003) defines “benefit” as “an advantage or profit gained from
something”. According to Driver, Brown, & Peterson (2001), there are two uses of the word
“benefits”. One is simply the monetary valuation of that gain. The second is referred as “a
change that is viewed to be advantageous—an improvement in condition, or a gain to an
individual, a group, to society, or to another entity”. They also argued “benefits defined as
gains or advantageous changes are thus directly subject to predictive modeling and to testing
for cause and effect relationship.” Since the study focuses more on the intention and attitudes
of elder consumers towards travel and what might be considered as beneficial, the authors
adopt the second concept of the definition. As Driver, Brown, & Peterson (2001) said “the
noneconomic measures are useful in recreation resource management.”
Studies on Benefits Segmentation in Tourism Wellness Market
There are many alternative segmentation criteria suggested in the tourism literature (Forgen,
2005; Kangas & Tuohino, 2007; Smith & Puczkó, 2009), such as demogrphics, geographics,
psychographics, expenditure. and perceived benefits.