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This study aims to construct a scale for measuring the spa hotel experiencescape in wellness tourism, clarify the mechanism through which wellness tourism experiencescape influences revisit intention and investigate the mediation roles of authenticity, memorability and organizational identification.

This study conducted content analysis of interviews, online reviews and relevant articles and used the concept of experiencescape to interpret spa hotels’ experiential environment. The stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model was used as the basis for introducing authenticity, memorability, organizational identification and revisit intention to investigate how wellness tourism experiencescape affects tourists’ behavior. In total, 488 valid questionnaires were collected at Taiwanese spa hotel clusters.

Four factors of spa hotel experiencescape were identified: health promotion treats, mental learning, unique travel experience and healthy diet. Existential authenticity–memorability and existential authenticity–organizational identification exerted full positive mediation effects in the relationship between wellness tourism experiencescape and revisit intention.

This study provides guidance on experience design for spa hotels. It promotes the consideration of existential authenticity in wellness tourism design.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised awareness of wellness, drastically increasing the potential of the wellness tourism market. This study investigated the construction of wellness tourism experiencescape and its influence, and the findings can facilitate post-pandemic restoration of the wellness tourism industry. On the basis of SOR model, a chain mediation model was proposed to reveal the influence of wellness tourism experiencescape on revisit intention. Existential authenticity was discovered to play a crucial role in the relationship between wellness tourism experiencescape and revisit intention, which suggests that existential authenticity should be considered during service design and in marketing strategies for wellness tourism.

The aim of this study was three-fold: first, to develop an instrument to evaluate food and beverage service quality in spa hotels; second, to identify aspects of food and beverage service quality of which customers had the highest expectations, i.e. the key dimensions of food and beverage service quality in spa hotels; third, to measure customer perceptions of the spa hotels in this study and to identify those dimensions with the largest gap between customer expectations and perceptions.

A self-administrated questionnaire was distributed to 331 customers at four different spa hotels in Balikesir, Turkey. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was used to identify service quality dimensions. Cronbach Alpha indicated the reliability of the factors identified. Customer expectations, perceptions and gaps between expectations and perceptions for each dimension were measured.

Factor analysis revealed six quality dimensions: “assurance and employee knowledge”; “healthy and attractive food”; “empathy”; “tangibles”; “responsiveness of service delivery”; “reliability”. Customer expectations were highest for “tangibles” and “assurance and employee knowledge”. The largest gaps between perceptions and expectations were for “healthy and attractive food” and “tangibles”.

Key dimensions for food and beverage service quality in spa hotels were identified and a reliable instrument for measuring provision was developed. This should be applied by managers on an ongoing basis to evaluate their performance and give them a better understanding of food and beverage service quality in spa hotels. The study provides specific information on the performance of Turkish spa hotels in relation to food and beverage service quality.

This research addresses the paucity of research on customer perspectives of food and beverage provision in spa hotels and contributes to enhanced understanding of spa tourists and their expectations and perceptions of the service quality of food and beverage service quality.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate financial benefits of spa operations in resorts by developing a spa revenue contribution technique/method.

This purpose is achieved by utilizing current industry and academic literature in the fields of hospitality and resort management.

The results show that a hypothetical resort with 300 rooms would achieve a spa revenue per occupied room of $40.08 which translates into additional annual revenue of more than $3,500,000.

One of the implications of this study is that a well‐run spa may contribute approximately US$28 per available room. Another practical implication is that spas are important generators of additional revenue as they may contribute, at times, over 20 percent to room revenue by using considerably less space than resort/hotel rooms do.

This paper derives its value from developing a specific technique to support the common notion that a well‐operated spa makes a significant contribution to resort revenues.

The purpose of this study is to explore dimensions of customer perceptions of factors important for a quality experience in the SPA industry and to assess service quality implications for these dimensions.

The empirical study involved seven Swedish SPA hotels. The first part was qualitative, consisting of seven focus-group interviews with hotel guests. In addition, service providers’ perceptions of customer quality were collected through seven quality cafés. The qualitative parts were analysed with the constant comparative technique from the grounded theory approach. Based on the findings from the interviews, a questionnaire was delivered to 400 randomly accessed women. The responses were analysed with exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis.

The focus-group interviews showed that the customers’ perception of quality could be expressed in the following dimensions: physical effects, mental effects, pleasure and flexibility. The dimensions for customer quality seen from the staff’s perspective were treatments, climate and the SPA facility itself. The exploratory factor analysis defined the following underlying factors: enjoyment, treatments, practicality, fitness, cost and calm. The cluster analysis resulted in four groups of customer profiles: the more of everything group, the enjoyers, the savers and the fitness freaks.

A limitation is that the study has only been carried out in one country. The main implication for research is a better understanding of quality dimensions and perceptions of service quality in the SPA industry.

The study provides a comprehensive insight into the dimensions of quality for SPA visitors. Moreover, four distinct groups of customers have been identified. This knowledge should be useful for SPA managers.

Only limited amounts of research have previously been carried out in the SPA industry. The paper provides a framework depicting perceptions of quality dimensions in SPA hotels.

Services marketing, hotel management, branding, and promotion management.

Undergraduate business and management; MBA/MA management courses.

Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts had become a leading player in the luxury resorts and spa market in Asia. As part of its growth strategy, Banyan Tree had launched new brands and brand extensions that included resorts, spas, retail outlets, and even museum shops. Now, the company had to contemplate how to manage its brand portfolio and expand its business while preserving the distinctive identity and strong brand image of Banyan Tree, its flagship brand.

This case illustrates how a powerful service brand can be built even with little advertising. It also exemplifies how pro-environmental business practices can co-exist with a firm's profit objectives. Set in a service context, the case may be used in discussions on services marketing, hotel management, branding, and promotion management.

Teaching notes

This paper aims to segment spa customers based on their preferences for a set of spa attributes. With the considerable growth rate of the spa market, it is vital for spa professionals to understand spa-goers’ preferences. However, academics and industry professionals have not devised a structured method by which to manage spa customers.

A survey was conducted using a face-to-face survey with visitors to Hong Kong who had visited a spa. By applying conjoint and cluster analysis, customers could be categorized into distinct segments.

Four customer segments were identified: spa enthusiasts, high spenders, value seekers and price-sensitive spa-goers. Spa enthusiasts were the largest segment among the four, followed by value seekers, price-sensitive spa-goers and high spenders.

Given the limited academic interest in the area, this study contributes to the literature by providing insights into spa-goers’ preferences and how those preferences can be used to segment spa-goers.

Based on the different needs, preferences and socio-demographic characteristics of the four segments – spa enthusiasts, high spenders, value seekers and price-sensitive spa-goers – spa industry managers could customize their strategies and design different spa services and packages to meet the needs of the four segments.

The combined use of conjoint and cluster analysis provides a new method of market segmentation in the spa industry. This study could help spa professionals to design customized spa products for the distinct segments, and thus retain and attract more spa visitors.

This study aims to establish customer service factors for wellness tourism from both service providers and customer perspectives, and to determine whether gender and age factors affect older tourist opinions of customer service.

The authors interviewed 13 experts in the hot spring hotel industry and more than 469 hot spring hotel visitors who are over 50 years of age. Content validity and homogeneity reliability as proposed by Aiken were used to confirm customer service factors. This study uses the verbal-linguistic evaluation to assess customer service factors and each service item associated with these factors.

Eight crucial customer service factors, from high to low, are personnel services, environments, healthy diet, relaxation, health promotion treatments, experience of unique tourism resources, social activities, and mental learning.

This study implicated allocation and management of input resources as the service factors that are used for determining the preferences of older consumers in wellness tourism.

Numerous countries are currently facing an aging population and market opportunities for wellness tourism are popular with the tourism industry. Studies show that enhanced customer service increases competitive advantage in the tourism industry. However, customer service differs from what customers prefer. For this study, the authors compiled the viewpoints of older consumers, hotel personnel, and expert opinions in the hotel industry to identify customer-service factors in wellness tourism. The analytical results of this study suggest that hot spring hotels in Taiwan can focus on critical customer-service items, resource management, and resource allocation.

This purpose of this paper is to enhance the level, scope, and detail of management information under the current accounting format in hotels in China, and suggests a preliminary research framework on development of China‐based uniform hotel accounts.

Focus group interviews with industrial executives were carried out to give a deeper insight of the issue and to gather more information for a better understanding of the up‐to‐date situation.

The preliminary findings of this paper reveal that there are nine new hotel business drivers that are currently not fully reported in the financial statements.

The limitation of the paper is that the number of accounting professionals interviewed was of smaller proportion among the interviewees.

The findings in this paper provide informative details on the existing financial performance reporting in Mainland hotels from a managerial perspective, and point out limitations of adopting the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry in China.

The paper shows that identifying the current financial reporting system in Mainland hotels is important to some new expatriate managers who are unfamiliar with local business conditions. A comprehensive and meaningful accounting framework could provide enriched managerial information to managers to make decisions and reduce dispute between hotel owning company and hotel operating company arising from different views on the typical way of calculating management fee that is based on the definition of revenue stipulated in the management agreement.

In this study we identified the process how consumers chose a particular hotel for spa service which was appropriate for themselves under such intensely competition among spa hotels in Taiwan, and the key factors that affected consumers' behavior or purchasing decisions. Previous studies have indicated that the creation of outstanding consumer value was for spa hotels to achieve sustainable financial and market success. A conceptual model of perceived value and six hypotheses based on previous literatures review had been developed in this study to identify the factors considered by customers while they were making the serious purchasing decisions. The conceptual model in this study provided a framework how the consumers might come up with a solution toward the process of resources allocation or the decision making. The economical deduction was adopted to provide the adequate rationality and somewhat the causality of the conceptual model, and the analysis of correlation was used to verify the hypotheses proposed. The results suggested that the service‐related decision was almost in accordance with the product‐related decision, but it was questionable for perceived value for money to be a significant mediator of perceived quality, price and risk and willingness‐to‐buy. The findings have important implications for understanding how consideration sets of service‐related consumption are formed and how the recent downsizing economy affects their attitude in “leisure service consumption” toward the selection of spa hotels.

The main purpose of this chapter is to analyze the relationship between service innovation and experience creation in the context of spas, wellness and medical tourism. The objectives include providing an overview of service innovation theory and models and applying them to the spa, wellness and medical tourism sectors.

Primary research was undertaken with the purpose of identifying the most important elements in the experiences of spa and wellness guests and tourists. An online questionnaire was collected from 17 different types of spa and wellness facilities from 56 countries including all kinds of spa, wellness hotels, and retreats. Information given was based on three major demand segments: local customers, domestic tourists, and international tourists. A case study is also given of Pärnu hospital in Estonia, where innovative practices are being implemented to enhance the patient experience.

Findings suggested that some aspects of innovation (e.g., design and technology) are not as important as expected, but evidence-based treatments, medical services, and natural and local resources are.

The research gives important insights into customer preferences and current and future trends; however, the research only focused on operator rather than consumer perspectives. This would require further research.

The research findings provide useful information to operators who are trying to create innovative, unique, and competitive customer services.

Existing service innovation models are applied to new sectors (spa, wellness and medical tourism) and new insights are given into how these sectors can increase innovation and enhance customer experiences.