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

Health Tourism – The SPA Goers in Portugal
Nuno Silva Gustavo
ESHTE
Rua do Campo da Bola, Quinta da Raposeira, Mosqueiros
2460-203 Alfeizerão, Portugal
nuno.gustavo@eshte.pt
Abstract
This paper is part of a work-in-progress PhD dissertation entitled “Tourism, Leisure and
Health – discovering the new SPAs”, the first national study in this particular field.
Having Portugal as a case study, a country in which Health Tourism was recently pointed out
as one of the ten strategic segments for tourism development, this paper aims at presenting
and discussing the new SPAs customers' profiles, as well as helping to understand how
relevant leisure and tourism moments are and how they are used in health management. The
motivations of these new SPA customers, their concerns with spa consumption and health
management in general, and the meanings of SPA consumption in global health management
are other issues focused on in this paper.
This investigation has a national spectrum and it includes about twenty-one cases studies,
including SPAs in different locations (in metropolises, cities, countryside, in and out of the
Portuguese tourism regions, day SPAs, thermal SPAs, and marine SPAs), different concepts
(e.g.: holistic), services (hydrotherapies, balneoteraphies, massages, aesthetics and natural
treatments) infrastructures, and main natural resources (tap water, sea water, spring hot water,
wine, etc.).
In the twenty-one case studies mentioned, and as the main investigation resource, a survey
was developed. This survey focused on SPA customers' consumption and on their health
management practices (the data was collected during three months with support from the SPA
Staffs). The data collected (824 surveys) was analyzed with SPSS (Statistical Package for
Social Sciences). It was map out the average profile of SPA Goers in Portugal. Different
consumer clusters were outlined with a scalable cluster analysis algorithm - The SPSS Twostep
– log-likelihood.
Keywords: Health and Body management, Leisure, Health Tourism, SPAs
Introduction
With the pace of globalisation, urbanisation, state-of-the-art technologies and on-line
consumerism in 21 st century western societies, people now live out the illusion of a new
paradigm – the myth of eternal life. In the euphoria of longevity, the adoption of healthy life
styles takes on a singular importance to postmodern daily life. Founded on biomedicalisation
and promoted by neoliberal philosophies of government, health has been reinvented as a
capital to be valued and optimized, taking on a unique centrality within the lifestyle concept
(Clarke, 2003).
In the light of a new social centrality of health, that is, the growing medicalisation of western
habits, the universe of health services proliferates, a reality which manifests itself in a
growing allocation of leisure and tourism time to body care. This reality is particularly
reflected in the discovery of leisure and tourism periods as privileged opportunities for body
care and management. In accordance with the new concepts and dimensions which