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

Table 2 Main travel purpose of the current trip by wellness segments
Main purpose of this trip
Non-Wellness
traveller
Wellness
traveller
City break 41% 42% 483
Culture tour 28% 40% 474 a)
Multi-destination trip (organised or individual) 27% 34% 486
Activity-packed holiday with lots of exercise/sports 23% 23% 476
Recreational holiday in the sense of relaxing, with little 57% 64% 491
exercise/sports
Curative stay (recommended or prescribed by doctor) 5% 15% 478 a)
Wellness/beauty stay 0% 36% 476
Visit to an event 17% 18% 473
Visiting relatives/friends 27% 20% 483
Private stay in connection with business/fair/congress 9% 10% 479
Hiking/mountain climbing holiday 10% 11% 478
Cycling/ mountain biking holiday 13% 11% 475
Seaside holiday 77% 80% 504
Culinary tour 28% 37% 471 a)
Wine tour 15% 20% 474
Note: a) Chi² statistic significant at < .05.
Another, more focused, approach to measure the perceived suitability of a destination for
wellness trips was taken be the related question of which country the respondents would
recommend for a wellness trip (third column of Table 3). Again, domestic countries are
somehow positively biased from the nationalities represented in the sample. However,
Hungary shows the strongest appeal among the remaining European destinations. For the
Asian countries, the relative differences are highest for Thailand followed by the Philippines,
Maldives, Malaysia and Indonesia. Finally, an open-ended question allowed for suggesting
additional destinations for wellness trips not mentioned in the closed list of countries. Spain,
France and USA ranked on top of these additional destinations favoured by the wellness
segment. Turkey was mentioned almost as frequently as France however did not qualify for a
specific segment. In contrast, Greece has the same frequency as Turkey but is more often
recommended as a wellness destination from the perspective of non-wellness travellers.
Before going on to the results of the image measurement itself it is important to check the data
for non-response behaviour. The responses to the destination descriptions (presented along the
5 consumption value dimensions for each the 5 countries) are not as complete as in a typical
“check any given item” response format. Table 4 investigates therefore if some systematic
influences can be detected that help explain the rate of non-response. The first column of
Table 4 shows the average non-response share for each of the 5 countries prescribed (5
European and 5 Asian for the two sub-samples in the order of appearance in the
questionnaire). From the Asian sub-sample it can be clearly seen that no sequence or fatigue
effect can be substantiated. For the European sub-sample this is not so obvious.
n =