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

Table 3 Past, future and particular wellness trip destinations by wellness segments
Non-wellness travellers Wellness travellers
Past experience
Future 5
years’
plan
Considering
wellness
Past experience
Future 5
years’
plan
Considering
wellness
Austria 70% 44% 18% 86% 56% 42%
Bulgaria 21% 26% 10% 19% 26% 15%
Croatia 79% 49% 18% 77% 56% 30%
Czech Republic 45% 31% 10% 48% 30% 16%
Germany 62% 42% 13% 74% 50% 29%
Hungary 44% 29% 15% 53% 33% 25%
Italy 74% 41% 16% 86% 59% 37%
Montenegro 19% 32% 11% 22% 35% 18%
Slovakia 22% 23% 10% 26% 23% 16%
Slovenia 74% 42% 20% 71% 44% 33%
China 7% 22% 10% 10% 26% 13%
India 6% 22% 11% 10% 31% 17%
Indonesia 3% 17% 11% 8% 31% 19%
Japan 6% 23% 11% 6% 29% 14%
Malaysia 3% 19% 11% 7% 33% 20%
Maldives 5% 29% 15% 11% 43% 28%
Philippines 2% 16% 11% 6% 30% 23%
Singapore 4% 17% 10% 6% 26% 17%
Thailand 7% 20% 13% 16% 38% 28%
Vietnam 3% 16% 8% 6% 25% 13%
However, investigating the effect of non-response further by differentiating by prior visits of
this destination (column 2 and 3 of Table 4) it becomes evident that for 7 out of 10 countries
the refusal of answering is due to a lack of personal experience. Exceptions that apply for the
Maldives, Slovenia and Italy demonstrate that perceptions and associations were more easily
accessible even in the event of no prior personal exposure. A final check, though, should
inspect if the problem of non-response spreads equally across the two segments (columns 4
and 5 of Table 4). In this respect, the proportions for non-response show only for Italy a
significant difference.
Following the coding procedures for the remarks and comments on the presented destination
proxy prototypes documented by Tapachai and Waryszak (2000) these descriptions were
broken down into 31 different attributes (see Table 5) for which agreement (“1”) or
disagreement (“0”) was coded. Differences of frequencies along these 31 attributes are
inspected for the two traveller segments: non-wellness and wellness. Hence, in total, twenty
destination profiles are available for analysis. Overall, it stands out that wellness travellers
have stronger (more frequent) associations with the destinations compared to the non-wellness
segment. This effect becomes more apparent for more familiar countries and applies for
European as well as for Asian destinations. To eliminate this awareness or salience effect the
following analysis refers to deviations from the average difference between non-wellness and
wellness travellers in descending order of strength.