Health and Wellness Resorts Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Health and Wellness Resorts - Research Paper Example At the same time, it has been ascertained that health and wellness resorts are engaged in standardizing and globalizing the products and services. Nonetheless, it has been observed that health and wellness resorts are also burdened with increasing management and operational issues arising from declining quality and increasing competition. Furthermore, health and wellness resorts as mentioned above are in the early stage of development thus there is a relatively less literature regarding it. Consequently, there is a greater scope for future research to be conducted in order to derive valuable insights about the health and wellness resorts. Introduction Over the last few years, businesses have started using the word wellness for describing both physical and emotional meaning. More specifically, the word ‘wellness’ is extensively used in the service industry particularly in the context of luxurious hotels. At the same time, travelling for the purpose of health is not a new concept. However, it can be firmly admitted that the term ‘health tourism’ is relatively a new concept in the market positioning strategy of hotel and resorts. Broadly speaking, health and wellness tourism is defined as products or services that are made accessible to people travelling from their places or residences for health reasons (Caribbean Export Development Agency, 2009). The primary focus of the health and wellness resort involves imparting good health and general wellness of people. It entails a wide variety of treatments and services. For instance, Canyon Ranch one of the leading healthy living and luxury spa vacations comprising resorts, a beachfront hotel and destination spa amenities both on land as well as on sea is determined towards expanding the concept of health resort by initiating comprehensive approach regarding health and wellness of people. The evolution of health and wellness tourism is a result of continuous effort of service industry to attrac t new and potential customers through promotion and campaigns of health services. It can be argued that in the recent times the health and wellness tourism has gained tremendous popularity amid the global tourism industry as it does not depend on the factors such as seasonality. In other words, the health and wellness tourism has increased the ability of service industry to generate favorable income even during the off-seasons. Notably, the health and wellness sector within the context of Canada has also accorded radical growth. Health tourism across the globe including Canada can be identified to hold a greater opportunity for the service industry to boast its revenue and acquire loyal customers. Furthermore, the demand for health and wellness resort is constantly increasing (Siriphannapirat et al., 2013). Correspondingly, this research study intends to review the relevant development, management and operation issues pertaining to health and wellness resorts along with making relev ant recommendations regarding future research scope. Literature Review Wellness Tourism Mueller & Kaufmann (2001) postulate wellness tourism to be the sub-category of health tourism (Mueller &Kaufmann, 2001). Didascalou & et al. (2009) argue that there is no single definition of wellness or wellness tourism. It has been stated that the development of wellness tourism is actually embedded to ancient form of tourism (Didascalou & et al., 2009). Boulay et al. (2013) argue that wellness tourism