A Comprehensive Model for Development of Sustainable Health and Wellness Tourism Destination at Manipal

Abstract

Health and Wellness as a concept has been practiced in India since time immemorial. India has a long history of wellness practices with distinction of being the birthplace of alternate therapies such as Ayurveda which has entered in to the domain of spas. This paper presents an exploratory qualitative study to understand the perception of people at Manipal about Health and Wellness and to establish the feasibility so as to propose a comprehensive model for the development of Health and Wellness destination at Manipal. The study was done by getting the feedback from the tourists, pilgrimages, students and the people visiting the Marena-an indoor physical fitness and sports complex center of the Manipal University, through questionnaires. A factor analysis using principal component method was done and the results have shown that stress relief and relaxation were loaded on the first component signifying that these are the most important motivational factors. The detail study of factor analysis has indicated the sustainability of health and wellness destination at Manipal. A statement questionnaire was developed to understand the various factors that would contribute to the development of a health and wellness destination. In order to get a detail understanding of the various factors to be considered for developing the model the various factors were combined under five dependent variables-quality, facility, marketing, location and potential clients. The set of five statements were included under each dependent variables thus encompassing a questionnaire of twenty statements and were distributed among the students, parents, relatives delegates tourists visited Manipal in the month of August and September, 2012. The Health Consciousness and Wellness Awareness were considered as the independent variables. and studied using the questionnaire I, framed on the factors such as concept of exercise, frequency of exercise, concept of health, smoking habit, drinking habit, concept of wellness centre, wellness treatments, relaxation techniques, factors to stay healthy, etc. Having established the Independent variables and Dependent variables statistical analysis was done to understand the relationship of the dependent variable to the independent variable. The results show that Health Consciousness is more correlated to marketing quality and location which explains that marketing is a very important factor that can create Health Consciousness which will lead to the need for a Wellness destination. Wellness Awareness has facility, quality and Potential clients as the more correlating elements which again emphasis the need for the development of Wellness destination. The fact that location and potential clients are correlated to both Health Consciousness and Wellness Awareness strongly supports the development of a Wellness destination at Manipal. With these factors a model was proposed based on the study conducted by Ritchie, J, R. B and G. I. Crouch (2002) for a health and Wellness destination at Manipal.

Keywords: Health and Wellness, Tourist Motivation, Factor Analysis, Stress Relief and Relaxation, Marketing, Potential Clients

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