Research and White Papers
Already a $439 billion market, the wellness travel industry is expected to grow another 50 percent through 2017, according to the Global Wellness Tourism Congress (GWTC). To determine how the travel industry can best facilitate that growth, GWTC recently held its first of three roundtables with tourism leaders from government and industry, who discussed how to better educate consumers, tourism bodies, governments, tour operators and travel agents about the benefits of wellness travel.
The roundtable — which took place in London with mostly European participants — yielded several strategies for stimulating wellness tourism growth. Among them:
• Avoid “Wellness”: Roundtable participants agreed that travelers don’t typically identify with the word “wellness.” In promoting wellness travel, therefore, they suggested marketing wellness activities and benefits — without using the actual term “wellness tourism.” Likewise, they agreed that the industry should avoid preaching (i.e., telling travelers they should embrace healthier travel because it’s “good for them”) and should do a better job of communicating wellness travel’s affordability and accessibility.
• Focus on the Bottom Line: Roundtable participants agreed that promoting wellness travel to government partners requires focusing on the impact to the financial economy and jobs.
• Use the Numbers: Roundtable participants encouraged one another to utilize data from GWTC’s 2013 “Global Wellness Tourism Economy” report, showing that wellness travel every year generates $439 billion in expenditures, 11.7 million jobs and a world economic impact of $1.3 trillion.
• Promote Lack of Seasonality: Roundtable participants noted that wellness tourism is less vulnerable to seasonality than some other forms of travel and drives consistent revenue streams over the whole year.
• Focus on Careers Created: The wellness tourism industry should start quantifying what the value of the jobs are, focusing on careers created, roundtable participants decided.
• Better Classify Wellness Tourism: Roundtable participants encouraged standardized classifications of sub-products (e.g., hot springs destinations, yoga retreats, weight loss properties, etc.) so tourism marketers can better identify and aggregate them.
• Track “Wellness” as Trip Motivation: Destinations should add “wellness” as an option for “purpose of trip” in their surveys of outbound travelers, roundtable participants agreed.
• Promote Unique “Wellness Resources”: In a world where travelers increasingly seek authentic, “couldn’t get it anywhere else” experiences, destinations must clearly identify and promote their unique wellness offerings, roundtable participants said.
• Fix the Job-People Disconnect: Roundtable participants agreed that there are not enough well trained people to fill the jobs opening up in wellness tourism. Governments need to be educated on what the jobs are, they said, and create the education infrastructure to meet demand.
• Connect Healthy Travel to Public Health: Wellness tourism can be seen as part of — and should be more forcefully linked to — mainstream public health discussions and prevention initiatives, roundtable participants concluded.
Said roundtable participant Dr. Fiona Adshead, director of wellbeing and public health at global healthcare group Bupa: “There’s a huge opportunity for the wellness tourism sector to make a difference … to keep people well and motivate them to change their thinking and behavior. I encourage this industry to think very broadly: People are aging and their health, sadly, isn’t going to get any better. Embrace that, and think about the full range of this huge market … from psychological wellbeing, mindfulness, teaching resilience, to realizing the increasing importance of nature on health.”
source: http://www.successfulmeetings.com / Successful Meetings / Home> News> Research & White Papers / by Matt Alderton / April 24th, 2014
