Author(s): Silvério, Ana Cristina ; Ferreira, Jéssica ; Ferreira, Fernanda A. ; Alves, Maria José ; Fernandes, Paula Odete
Date: 2022
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/22576
Origin: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico do Porto
Subject(s): Tourism; Health and wellness tourism; Thermalism; Customers; Thermal customer satisfaction index
Tourism per se is a highly relevant sector of economic activity that has been growing steadily. In turn, health and wellness tourism asserts itself as a tourism product with a strong trend in terms of consumption (Baloglu et al., 2019) that is expected to grow continuously in the coming years (Rodrigues et al., 2020). Given this reality, it was found that health and wellness tourism experienced about twice as fast growth when compared to other tourism products - by 2019, it recorded a 6.8% growth while other segments recorded a 3.6% growth (Global Wellness Institute, 2021). As such, it has been confirmed that this tourism product becomes a strategy for destinations (Hartwell et al., 2018; Pyke et al., 2016), the tourism industry, and even the country. However, the pandemic caused by COVID-19, incited a number of reflections about the competitiveness of the tourism industry.
