Anja Behrens

The internationalization process of Wellness Tourism Anja Behrens

Scholarly Research Paper from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: 1, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, course: Marketing Internacional, language: English, abstract: During the last decades wellness tourism has been booming worldwide. Stimulated by an in-creased interest in health and fitness as well as the need to escape from work-related stress, "spa-going" is now one of the most sophisticated and exciting ways of making holidays in the 21st century. Responding to the increasing demand for wellness, the tourism industry had to adapt its holi-day offers and hotel facilities by creating spa or wellness centres within the hotels and resorts - spa or wellness centres which opened in the cities recently are not entering the field of well-ness tourism and therefore are not recognized in this report. In this report the identification of wellness tourism, its development and its trends are the matter of interest. After the definition of wellness tourism we will delimit its components and some concepts in close relation. In a second step we will explain the international development of wellness tourism which means the underlying mentality changes and its reasons, the history and development of well-ness tourism and the international expansion of spa. The internationalization grade of wellness tourism will be worked out in the third part by giv-ing information about the most important sending and receiving countries, brand philosophies of wellness hotels and international associations of spa and wellness. In the last part of the report we will describe trends of wellness tourism related to the overall demand and offer as well as the most significant motives of the wellness tourist choosing a tourist destination.