Wellness Travelers’ Post-Pandemic Priorities and Motivations

The unprecedented challenges the COVID-19 pandemic created for us on an individual level have led society to embrace ideas about enhanced self-care and personal wellness. It’s a mentality that is also predicted to influence people’s travel preferences moving forward.

The Wellness Tourism Association’s (WTA) 2021 Wellness Travel Consumer Survey was conducted with the intention of providing the hospitality industry, tour operators and travel advisors with, “a clearer understanding of wellness-minded consumers’ priorities as they begin planning their post-pandemic travels,” as the organization explained in a press release.

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The online survey was fielded over the three-month period from April to June 2021, with nearly 2,500 respondents from 52 countries and territories participating. Its aim was to discover which assets, amenities, activities and other offerings key consumers feel are “extremely important” and which are “not important at all” as they plan their future wellness trips. The survey was also designed to uncover the factors that might influence these travelers the most when it comes to booking wellness-related travel over the next two years.

The top five offerings rated “extremely important” were:

—A certified safe and clean hotel environment

—A purified water system throughout the hotel

—Access to fitness activities in nature

—A hotel environment with sustainable and green practices in place

—Guest rooms with an air filtration system to guarantee purified air

The top five offerings rated “not important at all” were:

—Access to mental health professionals

—Access to fitness trackers and apps that can monitor things like heart rate in real-time

—Access to nutritionists

—Access to medical practitioners for one-on-one consultations or medical testing that could predict a predisposition to future medical issues

—Access to other wellness practitioners

The ranking portion of the survey was followed by an open-ended question: “What ONE thing NOT mentioned in the 16 items would be a wellness “Must Have” when you begin to travel again?”

The top three themes that emerged were:

—Safety in terms of physical safety, plus safe from exposure to COVID

—Access to stillness and quiet spaces

—Nature and the outdoors

The survey also asked participants to rank the factors that they thought might most influence them when it came to booking wellness-related travel over the next two years. The results were:

— Price, Flexibility (with bookings and cancellation policies)

— Trust (in the supplier)

— Destination Management (the manner in which local lawmakers have managed the pandemic)