Health & Wellness Tourism
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A ROUTLEDGE FREEBOOK HEALTH & WELLNESS TOURISM A FOCUS ON THE GLOBAL SPA EXPERIENCE TABLE OF CONTENTS 004 :: FOREWORD 007 :: SECTION I: INTRODUCTION 008 :: 1. SPA AND WELLNESS TOURISM AND POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 030 :: 2. HEALTH, SOCIABILITY, POLITICS AND CULTURE: SPAS IN HISTORY, SPAS AND HISTORY 041 :: 3. A GEOGRAPHICAL AND REGIONAL ANALYSIS 059 :: SECTION II: CASE STUDIES 060 :: 4. TOWN OR COUNTRY? BRITISH SPAS AND THE URBAN/RURAL INTERFACE 076 :: 5. SARATOGA SPRINGS: FROM GENTEEL SPA TO DISNEYFIED FAMILY RESORT 087 :: 6. FROM THE MAJESTIC TO THE MUNDANE: DEMOCRACY, SOPHISTICATION AND HISTORY AMONG THE MINERAL SPAS OF AUSTRALIA 111 :: 7. HEALTH SPA TOURISM IN THE CZECH AND SLOVAK REPUBLIC 128 :: 8. TOURISM, WELLNESS, AND FEELING GOOD: REVIEWING AND STUDYING ASIAN SPA EXPERIENCES 147 :: 9. FANTASY, AUTHENTICITY, AND THE SPA TOURISM EXPERIENCE 165 :: SECTION III: CONCLUSION 166 :: 10. JOINING TOGETHER AND SHAPING THE FUTURE OF THE GLOBAL SPA AND WELLNESS INDUSTRY RELAX MORE DEEPLY WITH THE FULL TEXT OF THESE TITLES USE DISCOUNT CODE SPA20 TO GET 20% OFF THESE ROUTLEDGE TOURISM TITLES ROUTLEDGE TOURISM Visit Routledge Tourism to browse our full collection of resources on tourism, hospitality, and events. >> CLICK HERE FOREWORD HOW TO USE THIS BOOK As more serious study is devoted to different aspects of the global spa industry, it’s becoming clear that the spa is much more than a pleasant, temporary escape from our workaday lives. Indeed, the spa is a rich repository of historical, cultural, and behavioral information that is at once unique to its specific location and shared by other spas around the world. We created Health and Wellness Tourism: A Focus on the Global Spa Industry to delve further into the definition of what constitutes a spa, and showcase different perspectives on the history and evolution of spa tourism. This topic is one that should hold interest for many readers, from scholars of the subject to more casual spa-goers, and will shine light on our understanding of health and wellness across geographical borders and throughout history. In organizing this collection of excerpts—curated from six of our top titles in this subject area—our goal was to first provide you with an overview of the issues at stake in the scholarship being done on the global spa industry, and then to take a more focused look at specific examples of spas and their roles in different eras and regions (among them the UK, the US, and Asia). The case studies we’ve included should give you a sense of the way in which the study of a spa transcends itself and ultimately opens up questions relating to socio-economics, national identity, psychology, and much more. We encourage you to sit back and relax while reading Health and Wellness Tourism and create your own spa experience, whether you’re at home, in your office, or soaking your feet in a remote, tropical locale. And if that’s not enough, remember that you can always relax even further with the full text of any of the books excerpted here. SECTION I - INTRODUCTION The three chapters that make up the introduction to Health and Wellness Tourism spotlight the ways in which the study of the global spa industry opens up when examined through different perspectives, and also opens up further avenues of study. In our first chapter, Philip Pearce, Sebastian Filep, and Glenn Ross endeavor to apply insights from positive psychology to the study of spa tourism. Looking specifically at issues of motivation and well-being, the authors attempt a relatively new course of study by looking at this subject through a perspective informed by medical science. Our second chapter, written by John K. Walton, complements this first one by ROUTLEDGE 4 ROUTLEDGE.COM FOREWORD considering spas from a historical point of view, and illustrates how the evolving notion of the spa throughout history raises questions dealing with issues such as colonization, class issues, and economic systems, among other things. Chapter three, an excerpt from Health, Tourism and Hospitality, serves as a good transition into the case studies that follow in Section II, and provides an overview of the defining characteristics of different spas around the world. This virtual tour of the global spa industry demonstrates the importance of geographical considerations when looking at the global spa experience, and gives readers a glimpse into the more practical aspects of the spa phenomenon. SECTION II - CASE STUDIES In this series of case studies, we take a look at examples of spas in regions spanning almost every continent. In chapter four, Peter Borsay draws a parallel between the ambiguous role of the spa in Great Britain and the country’s own uncertainty about whether its identity is more town or country during the 19th century. Chapter five takes us to Victorian-era spa town Saratoga Springs, and identifies what elements of it were kept in Disney’s nostalgia-themed resort of the same name. In so doing, author Gary Cross gives us an idea of how a modern U.S. resort compares to the spas of a more genteel time. Chapters six and seven both take on questions of national identity and difference. Richard White does so in chapter six by examining the tension between tourists’ desire to experience national cultures while being at a spa, a location he characterizes as “distinguished…by an elite cosmopolitanism”. Two former Soviet states take the lead in chapter seven, in which Halina Kotikova and Eva Schwartzhoffova examine the role spas play in the burgeoning medical tourism industry that has developed in the Czech and Slovak Republics in the post-Communist era. The final two case studies in this section focus on making sense of the benefits of spa tourism. Jenny Panchal harkens back to the introduction of Health and Wellness Tourism by taking up the lens of positive psychology. Unlike the earlier chapter, however, chapter eight seeks to apply positive psychology to Asian spas specifically in order to determine whether spa activities can be beneficial to the wellness of tourists. And in chapter nine, Jennifer Laing, Cornelia Voigt, and Warwick Frost explore the seemingly-contradictory elements of fantasy and authenticity so prevalent in the spa experience to answer similar questions. ROUTLEDGE 5 ROUTLEDGE.COM FOREWORD SECTION III - CONCLUSION Our conclusion casts a brief look back into the recent past, looking specifically at the establishment of the Global Spa and Wellness Summit in 2007. From there, chapter authors Melanie Smith and Laszlo Puczko turn their gaze forward to speculate on what the future looks like for the global spa industry. In compiling these excerpts, we made an effort to retain the citation method used in the original work. ROUTLEDGE 6 ROUTLEDGE.COM N O I T C E S I INTRODUCTION R E T P A H C SPA AND WELLNESS TOURISM AND POSITIVE 1 PSYCHOLOGY Section I :: Introduction 1 :: SPA AND WELLNESS TOURISM AND POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY There are contested origins and definitional dilemmas in considering both the topic of spa tourism and the concept of wellness. For the term spa, the most common origin is traced to the widespread extension of the name of the Belgian town Spa (Smith, 2009b). This destination still provides a notable example of the use of waters and bathing for health and pleasure. It emerged as a location of significance in the fourteenth century (Altman, 2000). The Romans provided the original name for the town undoubtedly due to its abundant watery attractions since in Latin the noun espa means fountain and the verb spargere means to bubble forth. The healing qualities of water were well known to The following is sourced from ancient civilisations, especially the Romans, so both linguistically and in terms of the way Tourists, Tourism and the Good Life by Philip Pearce, Sebastian Filep the resource was used, spas are firmly rooted in early European history (van Tubergen and Glenn Ross. and van der Linden, 2002). Nevertheless, the practice of taking the waters or bathing for ©2010 Taylor and Francis Group. a combination of health and leisure purposes is undoubtedly not restricted to Europe but All rights reserved. extends globally. Asian traditions of communal bathing in mineral springs and spas are You can purchase a copy HERE . also historic and ongoing. In China, India, Korea and Japan in particular, there is a long history of bathing for relaxation and cleanliness (Erfurt-Cooper and Cooper, 2009). Forty-nine different kinds of contemporary spa types are listed by Erfurt-Cooper (2009). A small sample of these reveals some redundancy of terms and the resourceful efforts of marketers to identify special offerings. The terms include day spas, club spas, family spas, fertility spas (possibly these precede the family spas), hot spring spas, ecospas, mineral springs spas, hotel spas, wellness spas, holistic spas and seaside spas. The diversity of types of spas is almost matched by the array of definitions concerning wellness. Some indication of the difficulty inherent in constructing an adequate account of wellness may be obtained by considering its nearest common antonym, that of sickness. It is useful to consider the comparisons between the two states. German researchers reject the commonly cited origins of wellness as outlined in the work of the North American research Herbert Dunn since they claim that Europeans widely used the term before its transatlantic use (Dunn, 1961; Erfurt-Cooper and Cooper, 2009). Nevertheless, some agreement about wellness does seem to exist across continents with key principles of wellness being that it is subjective and perceptual, multidimensional and underpinned by models of balance or compensation (Smith and Puczko, 2009: 54–57). The wheel of wellness which Smith and Puczko derive from their overview of other studies specifies emotional, spiritual, intellectual, social, physical and vocational wellness components.