As wellness has a significantly bigger influence on post-pandemic travel, the international Marketing and PR agency Finn Partners and Mabrian Technologies, the world’s leading Travel Intelligence company, have conducted this large data study, the first of its kind, to explore wellness activities and products currently in demand in travel today and the consumer archetypes emerging.
It will reveal the upcoming wellness destinations with the most potential for 2023 and beyond and the trends shaping the future of wellness tourism.
The study analyses all the comments on TripAdvisor since 2018 related to the Wellness tourist products and activities, to reveal global growth trends, wellness tourism global flows with a specific focus on the Middle East.
The study was presented last week at the Global Wellness Summit in Tel Aviv (Israel) by Cathy Feliciano-Chon, Founder & Managing Director, CatchOn – A Finn Partner Company based in Hong Kong.
The top 5 take-aways of the report are:
- Wellness gains traction for travellers. The interest of travellers in wellness has shown a constant positive growth since 2018 with more people making conscious travel choices and decisions geared towards the quest for wellness. The pandemic enhanced the interest for open-air activities and sports to the detriment of in-door activities such as visiting museums and exhibitions as travellers preferred avoiding crowded enclosed spaces.
- The pandemic had a negative impact on the SPA segment. During the pandemic travellers preferred outdoor wellness activities such as walking, hiking, kayaking & canoeing and bike tours rather than visiting enclosed SPAs.
- Walking wanderlust, the activity with highest demand. There is a high demand for walking tours in urban areas as a need to break from everyday life, to see, visit and experience something different. This is a light activity which does not need any previous training and that can be performed by all types of travellers and therefore, it has a large audience.
- Europe has nearly half of the world offering of wellness. Travellers are driven mainly to Southern and Northern Europe for walking tours in cultural sites. In Europe, its Southern regions have shown the highest increase in wellness demand in 2022. Northern America and Southeast Asia are the next most mentioned regions for wellness, respectively for outdoor activities in parks and for SPA services.
- Wellness plays a key role in the perception of sustainability. Themes related to wellbeing represent a third of all the mentions related to destinations’ sustainability. The perception of the level of sustainability of a destination depends on its wellness development. Therefore, the tourism wellness offer is bound to surge in the future as sustainability becomes an increasingly important driver for travellers.
Here you can see and download the full report including all of the information and methodology.
