Marketing Scoops: travel

Courtesy of Clinique La Prairie

Maybe you’ve always dreamed about visiting Switzerland to hike in the Alps and snack on some of the world’s best chocolate. Or perhaps you’d rather go relax in the dry heat of Arizona. Or take an exotic ten-day cruise. However you like to explore, you may want to tap into a new worldwide travel trend that is sweeping the globe. It may even help you find your way to a healthier 100-year-old life…….Continue reading….

By Michael Clinton

Source: Esquire

Critics:

Wellness travelers may seek procedures or treatments using conventional, alternative, complementary, herbal, or homeopathic medicine. Advertisers may use the term wellness to promote a wide range of miscellaneous products and services. Players in wellness tourism may target healthy tourists who want to maintain and promote their health, or cure guests who want to recover from illness and seek healing of bodily ailments.

Wellness tourism suffers from skepticism about the quality and effectiveness of the treatments and pursuits on offer. Individual wellness practitioners and programs provide diverse services such as beauty treatments, exercise opportunities, including physical fitness and sports, healthy diet and weight management, health-related education, and relaxation and stress relief methods in luxurious, privately rent resort centers, small hotels or sections of larger hotels themed for the purpose all over the world.

Wellness travelers pursue these diverse services as a form of stress control. Popular relaxation methods used to control stress include spiritual tourism, including meditation and yoga, whether classical or as exercise; Spiritual tourism is a growing practice that has evolved from a religious pilgrimage into traveling to a sacred spot in hopes of finding a special feeling.

Cruise ships offering wellness programs including the use of on-board spas. Day spas and destination spas offer short-term, residential programs to address specific health concerns, reduce stress, or support lifestyle improvement.Wellness tourism is now an identifiable niche market in at least 30 countries. Twenty countries accounted for 85 percent of global wellness tourism expenditures in 2012. The top five countries alone (United States, Germany, Japan, France, Austria) account for more than half the market (59 percent of expenditures).

Wellness tourism advocates suggest that vacations improve physical well-being, happiness, and productivity, citing that health-oriented trips give travelers a fresh perspective and positively affect creativity, resilience, problem solving, and capacity for coping with stress.Yet it is difficult to quantify the health benefits since many of the wellness practices are unregulated, and the growing industry negatively impacts the destinations that travelers flock to.

One study found that sectors of the wellness industry including healthy eating, physical wellness, and mental resilience had little to no statistical relationship with indicating better health. While these aspects of wellness are widely regarded to improve health outcomes, some believe that a higher level of spending in these areas does not actually improve health. In these sectors, the offerings of Wellness Tourism experiences do not have a tangible impact on the overall health of the consumer.

Many Wellness Tourism practices are unregulated, and due to the breadth of countries and organizations in the industry, it is difficult to maintain standards across experiences. Over 60% of retreats admitted to not engaging with regulations or certifications beside basic health and safety checks. In many instances, safety cannot be guaranteed during wellness practices. There are several instances where tourists on ayahuasca retreats have died while under the influence of unregulated drugs.

There have also been instances of tourists dying in sweat lodges and incidents involving cults during meditation retreats. There is also little regulation when it comes to employee training, and many retreat employees are only trained internally by their superiors. With the lack of regulations, it is difficult for consumers to determine which retreats are safe. Another impact of tourism is the environmental impacts on the countries tourists flock to.

As many wellness tourism destinations are developing countries, many of these countries are not equipped to handle the heavy influx of tourists surrounding the wellness industry. The draw of these locations is that they are remote: an escape from society. However, these remote locations lack the infrastructure to handle sewage, landfill, and enough natural resources to support tourists.

In 2016, over 1,500 wellness retreat locations in India admitted to dumping sewage directly into rivers, and Tulum faced similar issues. Wellness tourism practices also destroy natural resources and habitats; with the rising fad of ayahuasca retreats, plants were depleted naturally and providers moved to farming them commercially, leading to deforestation to make room for fields. Dimon, Anne (24 October 2013).

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