Recreation, relaxation or something else? Exploring the motives for visiting the wellness hotels in Serbia

Abstract

Nowadays, the various forms of health tourism are gaining popularity in the world tourism. In the last decade, health tourism is featuring a growing development primarily in the area of wellness tourism. Wellness services are today a very important criterion for guests when deciding which hotel to choose. For this reason it is necessary to pay great attention to planning and design of this part of the hotel product but also to explore the motives for visiting wellness hotels in order to adjust the hotel offer to the most dominant consumers. In order to follow the trends, wellness hotels should specialize in providing health information and a wide range of recreation and relaxation programs. Therefore, in order to keep up with good quality, hotel managers should examine the expectations, motives of the visit and the needs of their customers. Based on this, the main objectives of this research are to examine the characteristics of the motivational behavior of the tourists visiting the wellness hotels, explore the role of need for recreation in visiting wellness hotels. In addition, the study explores the relationship between the socio-demographic characteristics of respondents and their motivational behavior in relation to the wellness facilities in Serbian hotels.

A Study on Market Segmentation According to Wellness Tourism Motivation and Differences in Behavior between the Groups—Focusing on Satisfaction, Behavioral Intention, and Flow

“…Motivations are driven by human desires, including internal and external forces [51]. Motivations are the most important variable for understanding consumer behavior [52,53]. In tourism studies, tourism motivations have been extensively studied based on push-pull factors [53][54][55][56].…”

Push and pull factors influencing the choice of a health resort by Polish treatment-seekers

“…As there is no homogenous division of pull and push motives, based on literature on the subject [13,49,54,57,58,70,71], an authorial questionnaire was developed. Motivation elements were divided into push (social and psychological motives) and pull (resulting from destination's attributes, and explaining the choice of the health tourism establishment) factors.…”