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

Whether we opt for more realistic scenarios, or those more visionary as regards the current
issues (EFILWC, 2004), it is clear that health faces a set of new paradigms at the outset of the
21 st century. These require ongoing analysis and reflection, conditioned by a unique scenario
of uncertainty expressed in the paradoxical perception of loss of “power” over the body in no
way consensual with human ambitions and within the scope of new self-management
practices, a hybrid and universal approach to the body and its control have been presented as
the solution.
Simultaneously and in response, a new private health market has emerged rendering new
services, many of which represent genuine technological revivalisms of health practices from
a ‘golden’ pre-scientific era, expressing a new ideological promotion of health, sold under the
holistic sign of wellness, in which the individual is morally responsible for demanding the
best physical and psychological setup able to play a determinant role in day-to-day
performance.
From Natural Hot Spring Treatments to Health Tourism
In a postmodern society, increasingly organised around globalisation vectors, as shown by the
profound political, economic and social changes which mark the beginning of this 21 st
century, “Health Tourism” and the associated practices of health, leisure and tourism have
reinvented themselves and are gaining ever greater popularity as a result of new imperatives
and the greater significance attached to them. This reality is manifested in the reaffirmation of
a new leisure and tourism market, which now emerges dominated by new dimensions,
concepts, spaces and services. “In the 21 st century, wellness travel has become a global
phenomenon. (...) In response to increasing demand, traditional SPA towns around the world
are upgrading or constructing modern SPA facilities. The growth in supply is expected to
foster continuing market expansion, attract new types of customers and diversify product
offerings.” (Messerli, H. and Oyama, Y, 2004: 6)
Sustained by new holistic and wholesome offerings, the new leisure and tourism facilities and
products are today different from those of post-war Europe, then confined to the dominating
logic of classical thermal hot springs, dependent on the existence of medicinal mineral water
(a natural resource) and limited to an eminently hospitalcentric philosophy of service. Today,
supply within the scope of Health Tourism has tended to define itself as wide-ranging and
heterogenic, structuring itself according to global, holistic and health promoting parameters,
resorting to a panoply of knowledge, resources and techniques and not confining itself to mere
usage of hot spring thermal water in evasive leisure facilities (Tabbachi, 2008).
This is a distinct market, of facilities and products of a hybrid nature, where appeals are made
to unique and sometimes paradoxical fusions and interchanges such as those of the natural
and the technological, the scientific and the profane, the western and the eastern, the rural and
the urban. Despite leisure and water continuing to occupy a place of excellence in the
imaginaries of health and leisure, today this is materialised in a variety of services which
range from medical surgery in India (Medicinal Tourism) to recourse to therapeutic
techniques in a thermal facility in Europe (Therapeutic Tourism) to the simple search for
wellness by means of relaxation techniques (Wellness Tourism), thus concentrating such
distinct motivations under the umbrella of the same aims.
By associating these hydrotherapeutic techniques, irrespective of their properties or the nature
of the water used – medicinal mineral, tap or sea water, the new technologies and a service
guided by nature, the natural and ancestral (where technique, decoration and the surrounding