WELLNESS AND PROMADS TO DRIVE TOURISM’S RENAISSANCE
It is time to find space to think strategically, to gather and analyse data, to explore different scenarios and prepare to execute actions.
Strategically is makes sense to consider the potential for wellness and travel for health as a being the likely key driver of tourism in the future. This will be wellness in the round addressing the needs of the mind, the body and the soul….. and it will be top-of-the-mind in all decision making about future tourism choices.
The Global Wellness Institute (www.globalwellnessinstitute.org), the Wellness Tourism Association (www.wellnesstourismassociation.org), the Eco-Resorts and Glamping Network (www.glampingbusiness.com) and the excellent stable of publications overseen by the visionary, Liz Terry at Leisure Media - especially Spa Business, CLAD and CLAD Home (www.leisuremedia.com) are leading the way with regular information and inspirational facts and ideas.
Space and place, high quality environments, peripheral locations, biophilic design and architecture, local food and drink, opportunities for relaxtion, rejuvenation, recuperation and regeneration of the human spirit will prevail.
In the excellent book, published in 2014, called New Tourism in the 21st Century: Culture, the City, Nature and Spirituality, Ruben Lois-Gonxalez and his Galician colleagues envisaged a time when these values would determine the degrowth of tourism. It is worth a read about the time when “tourists recover the values of slowness, spirituality, transformation and acquiring knowledge.”
Destinations and services that can demonstrably meet the demands of the new post-COVID19 wellness agenda will prosper. The Tourist Authority of Thailand is already moving swiftly with the country’s Ministry of Public Health, the MInistry of Tourism and Sport and 12 different representative bodies to establish new ellness guidelines.
It is a time to get creative and innovative as to what this all means and what wellness tourism actually means in real terms.
Brian Appleyard, writing in the Sunday Times Culture magazine (3rd May 2020) reminds us that in the 14th century, at the same time as the bubonic plague was wrecking havoc (The Black Death that killed 50% of the population of Europe) there was the emergence of the Renaissance (what Appleyard calls “the greatest of all art movements”). He says, “art is what humans do in spite of and, often, because of catastrophy.” He goes on to say that, obviously, COVID19 is not the Black Death but as a result of the pandemic “we have lost most of what the ever-more affluent post-war generations could not conceive of losing: shopping, partying and the freedom to roam.”
In the 2020 issue (no. 16) of the Design Hotel Group’s inspirational review of trends called DIRECTIONS six thought leaders are asked (and this was pre-COVID19) to share their ideas about the future of tourism… and guess what… wellness tourism and the profound values behind the concepts of wellness and wellbeing are highlighted.
From Marcus Fair’s exhortation of the appeal of less-travelled places, Serena Guen’s call for substantial sustainability getting back to what travel is meant to be about, Siradej Donavanik’s call for us to learn from indigenous cultures and their respect for the environment through to Carlos Courier’s call for exploring the true assets of a destination. The emergence of a new pan-generational group of travellers with a new mind-set for the purpose of tourism will emerge rapidly over the next five years (more on this in the next blog) all gives hope to our DMOs.
