Opportunities and Challenges of Hotel and Resort Spa Business to Linkage Service with Wellness Tourism in Phuket
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Abstract
The objectives of the study are to (1) explore the current situation of spa service linkage with wellness tourism in Phuket, and (2) investigate the opportunities and challenges of hotel and resort spa business in order to link their services with wellness tourism in Phuket. Purposive sampling was used to select the 54 representatives from hotel and resort spa, wellness tourism business, hospital/clinic and academicians. Interview and record forms were utilized for research tools. Interview, focus group and community hearing were used for data collection, then content analysis was used.
The findings found that (1) at present, the main target market are from China, Russia and Europe, followed by Australia, America, Middle East, Scandinavia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and ASEAN, respectively. The most popular spa service is Thai massage and oil massage. There are some degree of service linkage between departments in hotels and resorts. For example, F&B department offers healthy food when recreation department offers sport for health and yoga. Therefore, most of the service linkage between spa, wellness services, and holistic health tourism has been occurred within the hotel or resort. The linkage between spa and medical tourism business were only in the form of the recommendation for reliable spa service when the medical service provider cannot operate the spa by themselves due to the limitation of the international accreditation standard for hospital. (2) Linkage opportunities include health trend, the accessibility of hotel and resort spa to other wellness tourism business and the use of Thai traditional medicine and herb in holistic wellness when the linkage challenges are the accessibility of hotel and resort spa from medical tourism business, lack for strong cooperation between wellness tourism partners, lack of database on health tourist behaviour in Phuket and IT system.
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