Wellness Hotel: Conceptualization, Scale Development and Validation

1. Wellness Hotel: Conceptualization, Scale Development and Validation Oscar (Hengxuan) Chi Chris (Zhe) Ouyang Christina Chi Washington State University

2. “The state of being in good health, especially as an actively pursued goal.”

4. Wellness: An actively desired healthy lifestyle

5. Why we need wellness hotel services? • Maintain healthy lifestyle • Boost your healthy life

6. How long can wellness last? Baby boomersspent huge amount of money on the products and services to evoke their feeling of being young, therefore, they would prefer to spend money on the wellness products and services, which let them become younger. As a result, the consuming behavior developed by the boomers will be the next generation’s(Generation X) and the following generation’s standard behavior. --(Pilzer, 2007, The New Wellness Revolution ).

7. Wellness Market • In 2015, the global wellness economy $ 3.72 trillion. • Global wellness tourism market $ 563 billion. • The North America market $ 215.7 billion, which represented 38.3% of the total global wellness tourism market.

8. Global Wellness Institute 2017

9. Hotels Providing Wellness Service Is wellness must be expensive?

10. Stay Well Rooms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sfiSaZktAg

11. Theoretical question: • What is a wellness hotel? • How to measure the level of wellness provided by hotel service? • Practical question: • What wellness amenities are desired by customer? • As a hotelier, how to design wellness service package? • How much additional room rate can be charged?

12. Definition of Wellness • Convergent: Active desire Ardell (1985), Myers & Sweeney (2005), Messerli & Oyama (2004), Gorton (1988) • Divergent: Dimensionality • Three dimensional construct: body, mind and spirit • (Dunn, 1959)

13. Definition of Wellness (cont.) • Five-dimensional model (Ardell, 1977) • Self-responsibility • Environmental sensitivity • Physical/social vs personal

14. Conceptualizing Wellness Hotel • Wellness Tourism Model (Mueller and Kaufmann, 2001) • Well supported by (e.g. Smith and Puczko 2008, and Chen et al. 2013).

15. Conceptualizing Wellness Hotel • Wellness Tourism definition (Mueller and Kaufmann, 2001) • “The sum of all the relationships and phenomena resulting from a journey and residence by people whose main motive is to preserve or promote their health. They stay in a specialized hotel which provides the appropriate professional know-how and individual care. They require a comprehensive service package comprising physical fitness/beauty care, healthy nutrition/diet, relaxation/ meditation and mental activity/ education”

16. Wellness-oriented Environment : negative environmental effect prevention elements Mind Health： -Mental Activity -Education Program Healthy Eating: -Nutrition Food -Diet Food Self-responsibility Relaxation: -Comfortable room -Peaceful environment Physical Health: -Fitness facility -Beauty care service Proposed Wellness Hotel Model Wellness Hotel Definition: Wellness hotel focus on the customers whose main motive is to preserve or promote their health and healthful lifestyle and offers a comprehensive service package to meet the customers’ demand of physical health, mind health, relaxation, healthy eating andwellness-oriented environment. Proposed Wellness Hotel Model

17. 1st Round of Focus Group • 39 experts from hospitality industry and academics with different related background • With a response rate of 46.2%, 18 responses were received • Participants were asked to provide 5 to 10 hotel amenities (i.e. facilities and services) that they believe a wellness hotel should offer • Initial item pool: 80 items (Current industry practices + Experts feedback)

18. 2nd Round of Focus Group • 18 experts who responded in the first round were contacted • Participants were asked to rate the relevance of the drafted wellness amenities and the understandability of the wordings • 9 responses (response rate: 50%) were received

19. 2nd Round of Focus Group • Eliminate irrelevant item (e.g. encourage charity) • Eliminate the items related to common practices in all hotels (e.g. provide swimming pool, non-smoking room) • Further combine items describing similar features or functions (e.g. Reduce internally generated noise vs Provide sound masking ) • Reduced to 35 items

20. Pilot Study • Student samples: 77 participants • Asked to rate the perceived importance of wellness amenities using 35 items • Exploratory factor analysis with Promax rotation • 7 factors were emerged based on eigenvalues • 17 items were dropped • 18 items with four dimensions were identified

25. WTP, Wellness Amenities and Customer Segments Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen 1991, Lin et al’s 2013, Leibe et al.’s 2010) Wellness Attributes for Different Customer Segment Similar studies (Barsky and Nash 2002: emotional demand and customer segment) Customer Segment Attitude + WTP Degree of Wellness + +

26. Contribution • Initial study that focuses on the “Wellness Hotel” • Develop a measurement scale of hotel wellness • Provide guideline for developing wellness hotels or incorporating wellness attributes in existing hotel properties • Investigate the potentiality of wellness hotel market

27. Thank you!