CBI Webinar: Opportunities in European wellness tourism
Good morning. Very good. Welcome to you all.
I'm James Turner from Black Sparrow Design, and I'm going to be your host today for another in-depth tourism webinar from CBI. This time we're looking at wellness and the growth and opportunities around activities such as yoga retreats, Spa's meditation, and lots of others, things that specifically inspire people to travel, to experience. Now, we will, of course, be defining what we mean by wellness in this session, but we aren't just talking about yoga and standing on one leg in beautiful places.
Rather, wellness is a range of activities and experiences that promote things like fitness, recovery, relaxation, personal, spiritual growth, and can be a dedicated experience, part of a wider package. And it can also operate in many budget levels all the way from backpackers to top end luxury travel. Now this is a broad subject, but we're fortunate states have several experts to help us navigate it and they're really going to help us focus on the important points in developing and promoting this kind of tourism to the European market.
Now, as usual, this webinar is complemented with two new reports on the wellness tourism sector that are available on the CBI website, but more on that later on. So stick with us. Now hopefully that sounds exciting, but before we begin, let's just do a little bit of housekeeping. You may have noticed we're using go to webinar again is our tool today.
And just a couple of important points that you guys will need to know about how to use the tool. Okay. So first thing to say is your all in listen only mode.
That means we can't hear or see you however you can interact with us. And to do that we kind of need to look at the go to webinar control panel, which will look slightly different depending on whether you're on a desktop or on a mobile. Now, the first and most important thing to say is if you have any audio problems at all, you can try changing your audio to a phone call rather than using the internet. CBI have set this up so that you can either be a local right cool.
Or will you be free depending on where you are in the world. But it's definitely worth trying if you're having issues hearing us. Secondly, and probably the most important one is please ask us questions. Okay, You have a questions panel on a desktop version and that big button with a question mark on it or something like that. In the mobile version, we're going to be pausing several times throughout the session to answer as many questions as we possibly can.
So please keep asking. It's really good learning for everyone. We love difficult questions and we don't mind asking simple answering simple ones either. So please do keep asking. And thirdly, you can also use that question section if you're having any technical problems or anything like that. We do have someone in the background who will be trying to help you as best we can.
We will be having a couple of polls today. They're going to pop up on the screen automatically. Don't worry too much about them. I'll take you through what you need to do when they appear fairly self-explanatory.
And finally, we are recording this session. We're going to provide a copy of the recording, plus all of the notes of slides to you off to it. So you don't necessarily need to worry about writing too many notes about everything that you hear. Okay, so boring stuff done now, Simon from CBI, some only if you're with us. I'm here, James. There we go.
Some. I would just like to say a few words to get us started. Hello, sunshine. How you doing? Hi. Good morning, James. And good morning or good afternoon to everybody joining us in today's webinar.
So I'm Simona Snow and Bliss. I'm a program manager for the tourism sector at CBI. The organization hosting today's webinar. And I'm sure you're all very excited to hear from our experts, so I won't take too much of your time, but I would like to give you a quick introduction to CBI and to the market information that we have available for you. So some of you may already be familiar with us.
To those of you that aren't CBI is the Center for the Promotion of imports from developing countries. We are a governmental agency, so we're part of the government of the Netherlands and we are actually funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. Our mission as CBI is to support SMEs such as many of you joining us here today to strengthen their sustainability through their exports, specifically to Europe. So how do we do that? It's a very big mission, of course, and one of the things we do is to offer practical solutions for bottlenecks in the export value chain that I'm sure many of you experience. And when we're talking about these bottlenecks, we know that one of the main issues that SMEs and the businesses that support them face is the lack of knowledge and information about the European market and about ways to access them. So one of the ways that CBI creates value is through this knowledge and through using our networks to make sure that participants such as yourself have access to the information they need.
Next slide, please. James So when I'm talking about knowledge and this information, what I'm talking about is actually the market information that CBI offers. So we have a free online platform. I'll go into that towards the end of the webinar that specifically targets aspiring exporting SMEs in developing countries that are either looking at improving their presence in the European market or entering the European market. For the first time.
We work across different sectors, of which of course tourism is is one of the largest ones. We also work in agriculture and consumer products and services such as tourism or outsourcing and the kind of information we provide aims to be very practical. To really give you an idea about what the market looks like, what the trends are, where the opportunities lie, and tips to actually be able to access it. How do you prepare your exports? How do you find buyers? How do you make sure that you're able to do business with Europe? And we try to convey this information through a variety of studies, which include market studies.
So information on the European market and the potential for market entry, and also practical tips on how to get your business organized, as well as more detailed information about specific segment specific niches. So if we're talking, for example, about wellness, tourism like we are today or about specific markets, whether it's the Scandinavian market or Western Europe, and we put this into specific product fact sheets. So this is just a teaser because at the end of the webinar, I'll show you what this looks like, how you can access this platform and how you can make sure to, you know, get the most out of these studies that we publish freely. But now onto our experts and James, back to you.
Thank you. So that's very nice. Okay. So everybody, welcome again. So just before we start, I'd like to make a sorry excuse about where I think we should meet our expert panel.
So could I ask the rest of our panel to join us, please? Claudia Laszlo, Alison. Okay. Well, three of them. Okay.
Good morning. Welcome, everybody. How are you doing? Very well. Very good morning.
And good afternoon. Okay, so firstly, it's always a pleasure to introduce Alison Burke from Medical Tourism, who has authored the CPI Wellness Tourism report that somebody was just talking about. Good morning, Alison.
Perhaps you could introduce yourself to everybody. Good morning, James. Good morning to everybody. That's good afternoon, some of you guys. My name is Alison Burge.
I'm co-founder and director of ACORN Tourism, which we set up 21 years ago. So I've been working in tourism development for the past 20 years. I'm also Cbi's market researcher, So we've been working with CBI for the last ten years, researching and writing the market intelligence reports that are on the website. So I look forward to sharing a lot more about Wellness Report with you in a few minutes.
Thank you, Alison. Lovely. See you again. Next, I'd like to welcome Claudia Falkner, who is the managing director of FIT Reisen, a dedicated health and wellness tour operator.
Thank you for being here, Claudia. Perhaps you could introduce yourself to everybody. Yeah. Thank you very much, James.
My name is Claudia Emerson's more than 30 years, the managing director from Citizen. And I have a lot of experience. I know nearly all I have nearly all personal contacts, all the hotel years.
And I was funded at the moment in the company for the product management, product development and hotel purchasing. And of course, I'm looking for the upcoming trends and that the always makes the right decision which packages we provide for the European market for business and tells me, and I am personally also very vocal in the product and I'm doing a lot of fitness and holistic healing methods and I learn a lot of this metal. Thank you. Thank you very much, Claudia and finally, we're joined by Laszlo Persico, wellness expert and co-founder of WW Life. Lovely to have you here, Laszlo. Again, just could you just introduce yourself to everybody? Thank you, Jim. It's my pleasure.
So, hello, everyone. I have been or we have been working in the field of travel, hospitality, leisure and wellbeing for something like 20, 25 years in various capacities. What's most relevant to the audience here is that we have been creating products and assisting governmental level product development as well as property level or individual company level product development somehow around wellbeing or medical or wellness. And that's what we really like doing, especially when we get into the implementation.
So apart from just coming up with great ideas, but then we turn them into actual practice and I think that's what we will really excite the audience today. Thank you. James, back to you. And that's the very important point. Great ideas are great ideas, but being able to put them into practice is where it really matters. So, yes, excellent. So thank you, everybody. Now, before we get started, let's just pause for a moment so I can ask all of you a very important question.
Just share my screen again. So first of all, just a very simple question. We'd like to put up a poll just to kind of find out a little bit from you guys about how we put wellness tourism is to you. So we're kind of polling the second The answers are the answers.
It is multiple choice, but you can only answer one answer. So do you. So wellness tourism, Yes. You sell and promote a specific wellness product. Bay Yes, you do.
But it's part of a wider package or a bigger experience. See, you are currently developing one but don't have one at the moment. They know you're not interested in wellness tourism at all. I wonder why you're here anyway. Or a you have no idea what I'm talking about because you don't know what wellness tourism is or anything like that. So I've just got to launch that poll now.
It's going to pop up on all of your screens and and so you should be able to vote in each of those now. So please do vote. So remember, it's yes, you do. You sell a specific product, Bay. You do.
But it's part of something else that you do see. You're currently developing one, so you don't have ones that promote at the moment. Date No, she's very self-explanatory or a you don't know at the moment.
So we're just going to keep that open for a little bit longer. But half of you vote it. I can see, I can check.
I can actually probably tell who hasn't hasn't voted. So don't make me chase you. Let's give it another couple of seconds.
Okay. I and okay, that's a good chunk of you. Okay. I'm going to close it now. Let's share the results. So, okay, interestingly, some of you did vote for Dory, but most of you were in the first three, which is good because that means wellness.
Tourism is something you already care about. Now, this is important and it's something we're going to keep in mind as we go through this session. And I certainly hope that this webinar is going to convince some of the people who perhaps voted in Dory over the opportunity that wellness tourism offers or those are in say, hopefully this is going to help you guys improve your product or create something new. Okay. Thank you very much, everybody. You get back to that Now.
With that in mind, Alison, can I come to you first and perhaps could you take a few moments to just lay out for us? Yeah. What is the opportunity that wellness tourism presents? Yes, certainly. Thanks, James and I would be having this debate right now.
Right. Okay. Can you can you see that? Yep. Looks perfect if you're good. Okay. Well, thanks very much, James. And hello to everybody here.
I think around three quarters of you are clearly already involved in the wellness sector. And we and another 25%, nearly 25% or just over 25% are interested in it and starting from the beginning. So I'm just going to run through, give you an overview of the European Wellness tourism market and start to think about how you can benefit from some of the opportunities or if you're already involved in it, how you can look more specifically at what what it is that you could be doing. And I'm going to cover quite a range of the topics on this, but I will be but all of that will be in the report so you can look and find out more details in the report as well as looking at the slides afterwards. So first of all, why did we choose wellness tourism today? We've had quite a lot of webinars recently at CBI that relate to the adventure market and we felt that wellness tourism is probably not well understood by a lot of the tour operators that we work with and some of the people we're working with. And it was really a good market to focus on.
It's a very large market, it's very valuable, it's very diverse, which means there are lots of opportunities there for suppliers and it's growing. And very importantly, it was growing before the COVID pandemic, but it's growing very strongly now, post-pandemic. So as James mentioned earlier, and wellness tourism, very briefly, is about the pursuit of maintaining enhancing one's personal wellbeing. And just looking at some of these stats here and compare it wellness tourism to adventure tourism, you can see that the value of wellness tourism is between four and six times that of adventure tourism, which is a huge market. Some of these figures vary a bit depending on when the survey and research was done, and obviously the pandemic has impacted on that. But in terms of both the expenditure and the number of visits, wellness tourism exceeds adventure tourism by several times.
This chart here gives you an indication of the total value of the wellness tourism economy globally. And you can see 4.5 trillion USD. It is a vast and very and is a vast market with lots of different elements to it. And wellness tourism takes up about about 10% of the value.
So just wellness tourism here is worth over 400 billion USD. So as well as being a valuable market, I think it's very interesting for suppliers that are working in different tourism sectors, not just purely wellness, because it relates to various other issues, including religious and spiritual tourism, food and wine, food and diet, a very important part of wellness tourism. And those of you that have Southern beach products and are working in that space and that there are clear wellness opportunities in that niche. And weddings and honeymoons also relate very much to wellness and wellbeing. So what is the opportunity? Well, first of all, the largest wellness market are Europe combined with North America and pre-COVID. Europeans took around 300 million wellness trips per year and this industry is due to grow.
I mean, the estimate is that the industry will grow around 20% over 20% per annum up until 2025. And with that there's a growth of expenditure and that means that you're going to see a lot more first time wellness travelers looking for different products. So as well as those people that are looking primarily for a wellness holiday, they're also going to be a lot more general travelers who want to involve wellness activities as part of their general holiday, a trip to a spa or massage, etc.. So to capitalize on this, you really have to know your customer very well.
And European wellness travelers have high standards. You know, they want personalized services and they're prepared to pay for them. On average, they'll pay over 50% more than your normal tourist. So it's well worth finding out what they want, what they need and what they expect. And that's very important if you're going to really be successful in this sector. So you need to know the specialist niches that are part of the wellness market.
So you need to really understand that supply side, what wellness is about. I know Claudia and Laszlo are going to talk more detail about this in a moment, but this just gives you a range of the types of things that are very specifically around wellness from destinations, yoga, pilates, meditation and medical care and treatments, religious and spiritual ashrams and retreats. You also need to know the differences between the different types of consumers. And if we're looking at the European market, we find the big markets the biggest markets are from the Germans, the British and the French.
Germany in particular has a very experienced long standing, has a longstanding wellness market, and the Germans are particularly active in medical wellness and their insurance on their insurance companies will actually cover the cost of a medical wellness holiday. The British tend to be more focused on mental wellness and they also spend more on their wellness holidays than they do on other types of holidays. The French spend the most of all the Europeans on average on their wellness holidays.
In addition to those three biggest markets and consumers are Dutch, Italians and Spanish or important consumers. And the Dutch want to relax. They want to get fit. The Italians love being pampered, and the Spanish market is very much a growth market. But also there are smaller markets in terms of their actual size. But that is still very interesting for you.
The Austrians, Belgians and Scandinavians are all very interested in having wellness holidays. You also need to keep up with different trends. You need to be looking ahead if you're planning your product. And I can see a lot of you that 35% of you are planning what wellness you should be involved in. So look forward and think about what's going to be happening in the future as well as what's just happening now. Holistic wellness holidays means thinking about one's total personal wellbeing, body fitness, diet, spirit and spiritual health, etc.
all as part of a wellness activity and packages and post-COVID. Europeans are more concerned about having a healthy lifestyle and they want to build that into their holidays as well. They expect that to be part of it.
And for Europeans, wellness and sustainability are very closely connected. So when you're developing a tourism product, think hard about the sustainability operations of it and understand what that means and build that into your strategy. Diet, good food, local produce. Healthy food is very key and it's a very key part of wellness. And there is a big move in Europe towards having a lower meat diet. And so vegetarianism and veganism are a growing market and digitalization is key now to how you can engage with your potential consumers and your past guests and visitors through wellness that's being able to provide them with personal information and through social media.
So keep up to date with the trends. But one of the key things you also need to really understand about the wellness market is that it works. It works on different levels of motivation. So there are primary wellness tourists and those are the tourists that are choosing and planning and booking their holidays because they are primarily motivated by a wellness activities throughout their holidays.
And cloud is going to look at that and a lot more detail from the relationship from the perspective of a European tour operator and Laszlo is going to look more at the independent market where secondary wellness tourism is very important. So secondary wellness tourists are those that are on a holiday maybe for a different reason, but while they're on holiday, they want to undertake wellness activities. Could be a trip to a spa, could be a massage, and could be just a short or one or two day activity as part of a longer holiday. And that is a very valuable mark. It's got a lot of opportunities for small, medium sized businesses, tour operators and local suppliers, and it accounts for around 85% of the market.
So I'm going to hand over now to James. I'm just going to point you to the wellness report that you'll find on the CBA website to find out a lot more information about what I've been talking about, a lot more depth, and I know Simon will also show you how to find that later on. So, James, thanks very much.
Thank you, Alison. Okay, great. So as we now have a kind of a clear idea of what wellness, what we mean by wellness tourism, can I pause just to ask all of you guys out there very specifically, you know what your interest in wellness tourism is today. Why are you here? What are you hoping to get from this webinar? And this one is a multiple choice, so you can select any and all that apply to you.
So we've got five options here. Is it just to understand the opportunity that wellness tourism presents? Is it to get more of an insight in who the European customer is? What are they looking for in terms of wellness? Tourism? Are you looking for ideas or advice in actually developing your wellness product, given that a good chunk of you are in the middle of doing so, are you hoping to get advice or ideas to help find distribution partners, tour operators like, let's say Claudia, take her up in any way who might help you kind of get your product out there? Or perhaps are you looking for ideas of how to promote a market your product? But to put that whole live now, which should pop up on the screen for you guys, please vote for all of those. Any of all of those that you're here for today. Just very interesting for us to understand what it is you're looking for. So is it just about understanding opportunity, understanding the customer advice and ideas and developing a product, looking for help in sourcing distribution partners? Or are you just looking for a promotion or marketing advice? Okay.
Or are you doing everything? If you're doing everything, that's fine, but do tick all of them. That's that's good too. Okay, we've got about now Kate, cycle over a little bit longer. Two thirds of you, come on. If you haven't voted already, please do so I'm going to keep this open for just a couple of seconds.
So if you haven't voted, this is your absolute last chance. We're going to close it. There we go. We are closed. Let's share it. Okay. Okay.
Very interesting. Okay. I was I was expecting a good spread of stuff here. And fortunately, we're hopefully going to answer as much of that as we can.
But let me just make a place, you guys, if that's what you've come here for today, please keep please submit questions to us. Please put questions to our experts about those particular topics or those particular ideas that you're interested in. We can do our best to answer as many as possible, and I like putting difficult questions to our panel, so don't worry if your question is basic or advanced, just please do send out. Okay. Thank you very much for participating. Now, we are very fortunate today to be joined by Claudia from Fitz Horizon. Claudia, are you there? Can you join us, Claudia? Hey, there we go. Hey.
Hello. Hello again. I get you have webcams on. Excellent. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So thank you. Claudia,
As we've seen those, as you said, you've got many, many years of experience and kind of insight into this market very specifically as a tour operator. So I kind of suspect you're the speaker that everyone is kind of waiting for, right? No pressure, but very interested. Interesting what you have to say.
So could you perhaps share with us some of your experience as a specialist tour operator in this area? Yes, of course. James, next stage, please. I have we have an agenda, and I've been talking about two special points. And I think it's very interesting for you, for all of you, how the European guests are looking for or searching for Baroness Products and will be we'll talk about this special points. And James, next page, please.
Let's start this fit title and Beyond the realness and have an experimental and travel slide. So the holiday goals of our guests are health and wellbeing. Of course, we would like to have this experience. We are a specialized to operator and we provide many, many packages. I think we have more than 5000 packages, just all of the hotel. It's in the hotels which we are providing and most of the packages, of course, it's detox, it's fasting, it's time and time cure anti-stress, all your vital.
And our philosophy, of course, is the high standards for ourselves and our contact with people. And we do it with heart and experience. We developed and create our own personal train trip and our trips are as individual as our customers.
This is a very important point. We have a lot of individual customers and they are looking for peaceful can packages. That means everything is possible. We make it possible and we have a deep allocation and full well-being can only be achieved in harmony with our own on the home and sources is also very important to sustainability. Next page please. All of Venice packages.
We have a holistic approach of body, mind and soul. You know what? What kind of packages be for Wyatt? I talked about once seconds before about mental health and meditation and yoga. We are talking about the healing power of nature. So in Germany or in Europe, we have a lot of just be included forest therapy.
It came from pain. So to make special meditation or experience in the forest, most important, it is healthy nutrition and always with diet, with vegetarian, vegan. We are talking about health prevention. We have a lot of health prevention packages. That means people who are avail of the important of their own health, they are looking for prevention or they go for holiday and combination and do something for their health. And they see it as a prevention.
And of course, yoga is very, very important point. We are selling so much better and German or especially European or especially German guests are looking for a holistic way to take a choice in Indian and Sri Lanka, because these are the places where the original Iovate was founded. We have seen a huge amount of people are looking for fitness because they are doing fitness every day, medical readiness efforts between them, clinic and hotels or many, many resort.
They provide medical wellness and medical treatments for more of in the wellness we way on of course Venice important hotel. Next page please James so European market potential for wellness tourism it's from the point of fit for as and for Europeans increasingly interested in buying a spa and tell us holidays we are more than nearly 50 years on the market. That means the company started 1975 and they started this classical healing course in Germany, in Hungarian, in Italy, because in most of the places they provide ten resorts and there will be have made a mixture between, for example, in Hungarian, they have a huge amount of thermal resorts of hot water and all the people go to for one or two weeks or more in earlier times, for three weeks. They do the procedure every day. They have got treatments, they have had a good food. And then of artillery weeks, they come back, relax and feel something.
I urinated. Then we have from the European menu the Venus have the traveler's expectation is side driven and it's to feel relaxed. This is the most important what the European guests are looking for. Next page, please.
James, the we talked about the Venus travelers are the people. There's this huge knowledge. They know exactly what they want. Maybe if they have a specialty sees it, then they go to a special place and we have the secondary travelers all kind of they are looking for all kind of activities. They're looking for sauna, they looking for fitness center. And the most interesting group for New Venus business, of course, is the second job. Rebellious traveler.
And we have some medical Venus tourists. They are looking for a combination between treatment for diseases, for example. They are selling very much also sailing the children of the Dead Sea.
This for the skin diseases, for meiotic diseases, for this, this also they make a combination. They go to this place. They for two or three or four weeks, but they also do long trips in this part of the world and medical wellness tourists. It's also very interesting because they stay longer and experience the benefits of treatments. Next page Greece Times the target group for the Venus holidays. It's all all kind of groups. It's couples, it's friends, solo travelers, families.
It's between 25 to 50. They are looking for active relaxation, for detox, for slimming the elderly people or the baby boomer or the millennials. They are looking for more for nature based treatments like tummy, water, massages, physio to help to improve health. So it's very interesting how we saw that our clientele gets younger and younger in the last 20 years. That came because your guys coming more in this part of the year.
Fitness is coming one the part of this Venus and it's very interesting. Next page please change so European Venus travelers you have heard fun and listen Germany UK influence a more the most important source of market for Venus and the Germans have a lot of experience because in Germany it's more than 150 years. People go and thinking about holiday in combination with doing something for their health.
But since we have a lot of developed term resorts in Germany, Italy and Korea and other places where the Germans are going in this time for the looking for a cure and the very important also the nationalities are quite different from each other, behavior and interest. This is also a challenge for us when we are providing some packages. It's working very well for the European market in a special way, but for the market sometimes it's not working. In Sicily there is a high demand concerning sustainability that's also coming in the last two or three years.
Next stage, please. James And what is your motivation to book a bonus holiday? The people who look for it and it's for the day. They they look for a trade for body, soul and spirit. So we are talking about a holistic package and they do something for health and well-being on vacation. So the Germans who were going for a bonus, they use seven vacation days, but they get that they have normally sorted for year and they have they would like to stay healthy and improve health doing their holiday. For us, this is a very interesting thing that they makes this combination between a vacation and doing something for their health.
So the motto could be You care about your health. So all the people are aware that they have to do something for their health. And we as a provider and you you take care about the guests. Next page, please. So the motivation to book in this holiday, it's its first event. It's experience.
When you go for wellness, maybe it's to get a new viewpoint and positively impact creative problem solving and stress relief. We are talking about a very being happiness and hence energy, de-stress, recharging, self-care, talking about healing and the natural way to recharge, for example. Or people would like to have trust the time out of the normal of normal life. What they are facing every day. Next page These terms though the most popular business segment, it's health and medical wellness.
It's by fit guys and term and healing cures. Then very important in the last two years because fitness and was one of the first two operator who provide are available in Indian and still contents of the European market. It was 30 years ago and now it's it's it's unbelievable how much it is for you to treatment or addiction was. We also have a combination competition in China some medecine European traditional medicine though we are talking about natural remedies most of sister packages have in the in content also natural remedies like mud and water or herbs or the special kind of medecine from from India miss libido from Chinese.
This is Chinese therapy. Even in Europe you have the European traditional medicine. Then we have the request for deluxe like spa and wellness resort in the last five years that also deluxe resorts they are looking for implement and more and more medical venous well you huge venous or they provide a lot of packages in the in the part of detox slimming Richmond remission on form this that's the package just for the deluxe market and they provide a huge facilities medi medicine facility so you can do check ups in during your holiday and this is also amazing what's going on on this market of course wellbeing, relaxation, yoga retreats, nature, pure nature experience, eco tourism. It's increasing transformative fitness or emotional healing. The more and more mindfulness is coming in the packages, meditation and healing from traumatized or that's coming also more and more in the last years of the packages and of course and very importantly, healthy nutrition all kind of education.
Thank you. Next page, please, students. And we have special teams in active leisure in health bonus and spa resorts. We have requests for date only holidays. We have request for the solo holidays. So solo travelers, people who are going alone by themselves and they are very happy to come to a place where they found other people.
And maybe in some places in some various resorts do have communication tables, or they can sit together, they can talk, they can make arrangements, they can make excursions. And this is also very common. Then we have, of course, a family friendly bonus, which hurts, especially in Europe. We have special wellness hotels where you can come visit your kids there. And also you have entertainment for the kids and a bonus entertainment for the kids. And this is also an increasing market.
Then golf and spa operates. It's for the short breaks. In Europe, we have fitness and health camps. It's coming back. One very interesting in Thailand, there's a body holiday, for example, in the Caribbean island, it's small offices, fitness, intense camp. We have walking holidays, especially in the last three years.
It's call it walking is increasing. A lot of people would like to stay in the nature, to be active in the nature. And for this they are looking for places like for example, the Alps in Europe, in the mountains.
If they can go for a hiking or activity holiday, next page views. The time is in motion. Currently we have you see on the left side and this shows for example nowadays are experts in traveling and they people have a lot of fresh and number of best features like grazing. And if you need to to weigh this intense care and the demand, of course is for natural healing, is for detox, is for sustainability, is for self trekking or hike is for anti stress improvement, for wounds, esteem, demand of very loving it. It's a nature experience and the self optimization coaching. Next page please change so how to create a tailored in in package though the wellbeing package it must be peaceful and support and usage of all the hotel health facilities.
Most of sorters for providing they have the huge spa and they have all the spa facilities and people then they go for overnight. They also can use the hills spa facilities, you can use a pool, they can go to someone else, they can use a fitness center. And then you put individual personal and expert advice. You put some health and put maybe, for example, in nutrition coaching.
If you provide, of course, in nutrition in the hotel, you can provide medical coaching, you can provide mentoring, coaching, a personal fitness coach, a yoga in a yoga trainer. So then you can create the in this package is what European people are looking for. Next page, please.
The point you put also vital components so we talked about nutrition and any kind of diets or special diets. What you can provide movement. It's must not be piloted but it could be movement. What you have in your region, relaxation to say mental health, fitness, brain food. We are talking about French food.
Food will have an impact of your thinking or your feeling and natural immunity remedies like herbs, herbivore treatments. Germany has knife it's very famous for climate condition may be very special place. This is a good climate. People would like to go there and it will put natural experience, thinness and healing. And in the forest in the sea, that doesn't.
And as you treatments like spiritual healing, energy, meditation, energy, medecine, alternative medicine, or maybe some shaman bitwise. Next page, please. So you are food.
Be your medecine. This is vulnerable to Hippocrates told many many thousand years ago that was a father of medecine. How important is nutrition? It's in nutrition. Next page, please, Though The latest Venus went from experimental to transformative, though the body, body, mind and soul altogether, it's challenged on a deeply personal level personal growth, life changing experience, performance art, music mixed this Venus trial, this music they have in Germany, some China resorts, this underwater music and mental health and optimization, the variety of biology built a better, faster, stronger you that's on the way would be fitness on the beach would be mindfulness a body screening and both more and more coming to other resorts. Extreme business training like what Olympic athlete experiencing body camp happiness and feeling more and more since COVID people obviously veer off the that they have to take care about their health by themselves, then more social and digital detox, for example, silent retreat meditation in nature.
You can provide in every part of the bird meditation in nature, nature, experience. This is, for me, one of the most important to the point or in the next. Yes, an emotional healing, balanced example. Come on, are you in Thailand and this amazing wellness resort, I think one of the best in the world. They have, for example, embracing change.
This is the name of the package. Next stage please change know as a summary. Venice Guest Use the holidays to escape stress and empower and to do something for their well-being. Request and offers change to Modern Venice. 20 days.
This holds Venice treatments aligned to personal business, this adventure, this emotional well-being, and this life fulfillment. So I have one of the very interesting to start on sentence is happiness. Nice. First of all, in health, this is what what I can give you as information. How to create Venice Packages. How do European Guest Menu Guest Market looking for and I think this some I would give you some interesting points that much it's much more easier to think about what you can provide as Miss Venice packages to the European guests.
So next page please. Host James So thank you very much. And you know, I'm waiting for your questions.
Thank you, Claudia. That was that was fantastic and a good a good run through of what you see as a tour operator in this very specific space. Okay. In fact, let's do that at this point. Let's hand over to everybody out there and let's see what questions we have so far.
So could I ask Laszlo Allison to join us so we can put some tricky questions to all four of you? Because it would be unfair just to throw them all to Claudia. Okay, good stuff. Okay, So, actually, Claudia, I'm going to put the first one to you.
Someone has just said, Could you elaborate a little bit more on what you mean by transformative wellness? Transformative? Melissa I mean, more than the way that the people are now more besides driven. They would like to see results and they go for business. They would not, not normally. In earlier times people go to a hotel, they stay in a pool, they go for a little bit for fitness. This was very nice for transformative.
Wellness is something more. They are looking for healing properties, maybe emotional healing, or maybe that they found something more about themselves, that they have special treatment, that they get special advice from coaches. That is what are meaning this transformational, transformational bonus. Okay. It's more it's a deep go deeper in the values that you see, recites the most successful packages on the package just and the people come back after maybe one week, two weeks, three week and they see by themselves episode.
Maybe they have more energy, maybe they feel better and then they will come because this also people are coming back. Okay. So it's a big focus on kind of results, isn't it? It's about saying, you know what, can we actually show that you've gained from this apart from maybe to maybe how I can change my life to the way that I feel better? Okay. All right. Excellent.
Okay. Alison, could I just put a question to you? Laszlo, I'm not forgetting you. We will come to you in a moment. Alison, You mentioned, but I think both of you have mentioned both primary and secondary wellness travelers. If we're in the middle of developing a product, which a big chunk of our audience are, where should they be pushing? First of all, is it worth going after those primary wellness travelers in the first instance? Or is it easier to kind of sell into the secondary market? It depends very much what product you've got to offer.
I think, you know, Claudius has given us a very clear run through and an idea of what a tour operator from Europe is looking for. If they're putting together holidays for the primarily for those primary and wellness tourists that are booking their holidays because that's their first motivation and they're probably working. I think Claudia works a lot with the with hotels that can offer very specialist treatment.
And if you're a local supplier, you need to think whether you've got a product that can supply a hotel like that. If you're maybe not working very specifically in that little less tourism sector at the moment or your product isn't so directly related to that mainstream area of of wellness, then you might be looking at what type of offer you can put to secondary tourists or if you want to market that yourself. I mean, looking at rather than working with a hotel or a bigger supplier. So for the secondary market, you know, if you've got, for example, if you're currently working an adventure or you've that's where your marketing into the adventure market, but you're actually listening to this, you hear that, you know that outdoor nature is so important that people want to be active and you may well want to think about what secondary products you might have have on offer. Okay. Yep, fair enough. Sounds sensible.
Laszlo, I have a question for you. Unfortunately, the persons left because I've just got nice vacation that you've never asked the question they've left, but I'm going to ask it to you anyway. And Claudia mentioned a couple of times about this idea of self-tracking and apps, things like that. What is the role that they play in wellness? How important could those be or what's the potential for those as part of promoting your wellness? I believe that's more of a tool and less so of the objective, often in terms of product development and even product proposition service providers mix up a little objective or tool tools can be very useful to optimize the results and give feedback and to collect information previously at or during visits about certain results and certain performances.
But I think what's what's happening now, and Claudia might second me on that, that we can see those happening on, including these kind of gadgets and apps and tools and monitoring systems and whatever it is, and then at the same time to get rid of all of it and go totally technology free because they are both of those happen. And I think that's important to know that there's no one way in the wireless, and especially when I look at the medical business and various destinations and service providers, you can find your way of doing so there is no golden rule that this is what everybody has to do. So you may include it for a certain purpose, certain reason, or you just totally get rid of it or wouldn't even consider it for another reason, not just not doing it. Which is fair enough, because we actually have talked about the whole point of wellness is to have that break or that retreat from, you know, your everyday life or that the issues that you may be struggling with, one of which for a lot of us is technology.
So, yes, it could work both ways. Okay, fantastic. Claudia, you talked you mentioned sustainability a couple of times.
Could you just give us a couple of examples about how sustainability is included when you create these wellness tourism packages? And yes, I can give you some examples. For example, in some most of the hotels, they look, they say take care about, for example, how often they this, what kind of how they wash, see the dishes or they produce some special equipments for in the hotel, though they are very much about sustainability because they know that people are also looking about sustainability. You know, it's connected to business.
You cannot be you cannot go for business and you use all the plastic and the most of the hotels to say they don't want to use plastic anymore. They use natural products from the from the regions. And and this is also very interesting, though, also the people in the region, they have a lot of possibility to create something, you know, for example, two things they will be not only and towels in the hotel, but many more other things. So you can produce, you can make your own form, special, special plants. It's very interesting what's going on on the market.
Okay. Yeah, not fair enough. I mean, you know, sustainable, sustainable tourism, sustainable efforts, all they are, they just very important as part of that wellness package because that's part of as part of what people are buying into. You know it's all about that feel good factor and it has to be experience has to match up with what they're looking for. Most of most of our hotels, they provide medecine for herbs things to sip for as a sustainability. Yeah. Sounds good to do. Yeah. Okay. Right.
This is a question I I'm going to put it to Alison, but anyone else who wants to jump in because this one's interesting. So we have someone who's posted a question that says they have a natural resource that locals have been using for a huge amount of years for their own wellness. A international investor has brought this up to turn it into a wellness resort. And now there is some problems because they feel the locals are denied access to it. How can you balance those kind of interests in terms of, you know, economic and tourism development and the needs of access for local people as well? Well, I think with all these developed with tourism development, what is absolutely key is to engage the local community in it.
You know, one of the reasons what you're selling is you're selling something that's a local treatment or a local product. And the reason that it's there to sell is that it has a benefit for the local population. That's why they're using it. And so that, you know, collaboration that with that engagement with local people is going to, you know, if it's done well, it should, you know, it will enhance your product, you know, by involving them, engaging them, making sure they benefit from it. Otherwise, you're likely to have very disaffected local people. And that's not going to create a good atmosphere and a positive atmosphere for these people that are coming to this wellness treatment.
I'm sure Leslie can add something to that as well. But I think that, you know, that local engagement with people is absolutely key. I would add a different angle, which is that's why you need planning at the destination level or at a governmental level to understand whatever you are going to do, what it does to tourism and what it does to the destination and into the community. Otherwise, you look at it as an asset which you can sell and that's where it ends your testimony. And then there you go. So destination planning or let's say business, tourism planning or asset based planning, that's what the body has been advocating.
And the lucky to have been supporting in many countries, because that's exactly the balance of how to balance the local demand, which has the heritage and the experience and the traditions and how you translate it into some sort of tourism product or experience. And you keep balancing between the the heritage, the history, the local importance, as well as the value that's provided for tourists, that requires planning and not just having an item on your asset list. Yeah, which is a really good point, which is a really good point, especially because we're talking a lot of places about, you know, development in countries where these things aren't as easy to do as perhaps in others. You know, there's lots of potential barriers and issues that you have to be aware of.
Okay. Thank you, Claudia. Sorry, I've got one more question for you. How can providers approach and work with tour operators such as Fitzroy's and what's the process? Or how is the best way of being able to work with people like you to promote their products? The best of all is they come in contact. They can send us an email, for example, that they are interested, and then they have of course they can explain what they are providing and then we can make discussion, if you can put it in our O'Connell or put it in our package or not, be okay.
Are There any can I just ask very quickly, are there any specific standards or regulations that you would require that somebody holds or signs up to to do this? Of course, it's it's quality. It's not the quality, it's the security. Also to provide some we have learned after the European or it's. Yeah, okay.
All right. Thank you. Okay. What else should we ask? Oh, Laszlo. Yes, we're talking. We've got a lot of people here who are developing potentially developing a new tourism product.
There is this perception that that's going to cost a lot of money, that significant investment. Is that always the case, or can you provide a wellness product for I mean, I'm not suggesting doing it for free, but, you know, does it have to be an absolutely massive and significant investment to do this? I have one answer which has actually two angles to it. Yes, I know if you're if you have a lot of money, you can create the most spectacular proposition in a building with fabulous materials and designers and products and everything.
That's a possibility. Of course, we have many of those. And the other activity is the portfolio. You can find fascinating and fantastic properties.
At the same time, I think we need to understand that this is not money dependent exercise, as long as you understand the proposition you are doing and the the way of wellness understanding you are focusing on, you can create very good quality for even no investment whatsoever required financial investments. What investment you need is thinking and creative content because does give you an idea which you might say this, how stupid it is, but when you do go to yoga, that's not exactly expensive, is it? Or you need a couple of goats and they build sell the whole of the whole package. And of course, very few those who are very hard core yogic person, they might say this is totally not a rubbish, which may be the case about there is light interests who would like to have some fun, they would like to have some experiment, they would like to try something new.
David Absolutely love to join and they will have the the best time of their lives and may be just a one off. And so what? It's a one off. It's a good start. So hang on that actually the setting was a very good and I should do do a little bit more of it. So there's all that many ways that you can get engaged in this business and really encourage to sort of keep an open mind and look out for opportunities.
How to incorporate various contents and resources and ideas into a proposition which eventually will be translated by guest as, Oh, I feel better. And that's what basically bonuses fair enough. So so the long answer is not necessarily.
No. Yeah, that's exactly most of what you have and you approach your audience is basically what we're saying. Yes. Yeah, definitely. Okay, brilliant. Thank you guys so much.
We all can ask some more questions later on, so please do keep submitting them as we have really interesting ones and then we will get to the rest of them, I promise. Some of them are a bit harder, So yeah, we'll look forward to those. In the meantime, can I just ask you guys once again to just participate in a very quick poll with me and we just like we've just heard from the kind of the tour operator perspective, I guess we're quite interested. CBI is how you are promoting and selling your wellness tourism propositions.
So I'm just going to put my screen back on. We're just going to launch a poll. This one is one answer only.
We just like to know from you what is your main sales platform for your wellness tourism products? Do you sell them directly, perhaps for your own websites? Are you using specialist tour operators like FIT? Roisin But not necessarily fit right? And there are others. Do you sell them via general tour operators? Are you mostly using online travel agents? So things like via Tor, things like that, or if you have another route to market. So I'm just going to launch that poll now. We should pop up please folks to that which the interesting. What's your most your biggest your main sales platform what's the way you're putting your products in front of your customers? Okay. Remember, that's are you selling them directly? Are you going for a specialist health and wellness tour operator? Are you going for a general tour operator? Do you mostly sell your products via online travel agencies or is it something else? Perhaps word of mouth, perhaps local networks, things like that, Please? Steve.
I think we just really interested to see how you're getting this out there to people. Okay. All right. But half of you voted again. I'm just to keep this open for another couple of seconds. Okay? Okay. So either direct to consumer via specialist operators, general operators, OTAs or other.
Okay. I'm just going to close that now. Last chance. Done. Okay. So these results actually a big chunk of you are actually selling them directly direct. There are a lot of people using five specialist tour operators.
Okay. Interesting results, perhaps not unsurprising. I'm quite intrigued about the other element in that unfortunately, with these polls, we can't have open ended questions and ask you. But if anyone would like to share in the questions any particular ways that they are, so they find a particularly useful way of getting this bonus products out that be quite useful for us. Okay, good stuff. Now let's ask another question.
How can we better understand and promote wellness tourism? So it really resonates with our target audience Now, Laszlo, can I ask for your expertise here? Perhaps can you help us think about wellness that bit deeper? You know, how we can kind of make the most of the opportunity, how we can specifically focus in on what people specifically are looking for and what they want? Yes, most certainly. And that's that's the plan. Yes. Here we go. And they just way too many screens, open and sensory and just a learning process. You're in control now, so you'll. Fantastic. Thank you so much.
All right. I just looked at the registrants list and I was really fascinated to find out that theoretically you have a lot of people from I just want to mention three countries, Jordan, Sri Lanka and Costa Rica. And the reason why I'm mentioning these three countries, because we were lucky enough to facilitate certain level development s tourism development in these three countries. So if you if you were from Costa Rica, I do suggest to contact etc., to find out what their latest plans are because the toolbox is really set to be created for them. So bank on the door and sighted guys who want to do more stuff on this.
So you help us a little bit in Jordan, just wait a couple of days before motor and JTB are going to publicize the material that's been created for them, which is going to be quite eye opening, I believe. And then in Sri Lanka, you can already look at that volunteerism strategy that was created like 2 to 3 years ago that you can look at. So we can see that there is significant interest from a governmental level as well. And I think that's very important to everyone to have a guidance. You can find your last 7 minutes ago when I mentioned go to yoga and I can make you laugh in many other ways as well, because there are many different products, some of which wouldn't be shared today.
And most of it's because they're not necessarily public public materials because of the nature of those products. But you can find anything and everything in this business. So what I'm going to do today is to identify a couple of pointers and directions that hopef
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