Niche Market: Wellness Travel

The new year brings with it a sense of new begininnings. For many, that means attempts to adopt a healthier lifestyle. Wellness travel, a niche market that spans yoga retreats to plastic surgury, could be a timely pitch to your clients. Consider these elements of the market, reported by Wellness Tourism Worldwide:

Wellness Travel could include multiple partners:

• Medical professionals and wellness practitioners who understand the value of vacations in promoting mental health, physical activity and social engagement.
• Parks and recreation professionals and outdoor outfitters who value nature's solution to a sedentary and urbanized lifestyle.
• Museums, cultural attractions and organizations that understand art's important role to engagement, innovation, creativity and emotional, intellectual, physical and social well-being.
• Farms, ranches and food-related organizations and companies who seek to preserve local food culture and improve health and sustainability.
• Travel businesses, organizations, associations and professionals that understand vacations are a need—not a luxury—and that travel is a top contributor to the economy.
• Meeting planners and human resource professionals who recognize the growing emphasis on a sustainable work force and the need to maintain the health of meeting and conference participants.
• Organizations that promote family values and understand the need for quality time, personal enrichment and memory making through travel.
• Progressive business executives, managers and entrepreneurs who value vacations' positive impact on productivity and work/life balance.
• Labor unions and other organizations representing workers and advocate for employee rights, benefits, and compensation.
• Insurance companies seeking to reduce claims through wellness promotion and by encouraging physical, social and emotional well-being through an active and engaged way of life.
• Teachers, schools, universities, colleges and institutions that promote life-long learning, social studies, creative arts, language skills and educational enrichment.
• Social justice organizations that support fair trade and responsible community development.
• Environmental organizations that understand that people's health is tied to the environment in which they live and recreate.
• All people who care about work/life balance, quality of life and well-being.

Defining wellness has been a challenge to advocates, academics, and businesses, but even more formidable has been facilitating higher levels of individual, social and national well-being.

Wellness Travel in America: Shaping Health, Businesses & Economy provides data on wellness travel in the United States, examining a broad spectrum of stakeholders and confluences between sectors affecting both population and economic health. The report can be used to understand how wellness travel can play a significant role in disease prevention, workplace wellness, vacation policy development, tourism development and destination marketing.

The report includes an extensive review of wellness trends, workplace policies and proprietary data collection and analysis of U.S. consumers interested in healthy travel, resulting in a data-driven profile marketers can use to promote their brand.

Concepts such as wellness vacations, healthy hotels and business-related wellness perks are on the rise as organizations seek to contain health care costs and drive volume and profits.

• Better integrate wellness concepts in leisure travel and business.
• Gain understanding of wellness travel consumers, their interests, perceptions and needs as well as motivations, decisions and preferences.
• Promote healthy lifestyle vacation travel as an engine for economic growth, personal enrichment and better work/life balance.

Wellness Tourism Worldwide Founder and CEO Camille Hoheb remarked, "Wellness tourism cuts across multiple sectors to stimulate entrepreneurship, innovation, and a more comprehensive approach to population health and financial stability."

Wellness Tourism Worldwide offers a range of resources to aid in planning wellness travel. For more information, click here.