The global tourism industry and the wellness industry
are both undergoing a major growth phase fuelled by the consumers’
ever-increasing desire for not only emotional experiences but also more permanent
transformations and lifestyle changes. The current trend stretches the
traditional logic of value creation and requires innovation if the tourism
firms wish to keep up with the shifting consumer needs. In this chapter, we
present the wellness tourism industry as a model example of the experience
industry and discuss wellness tourism experiences in the light of value
creation and innovation. Through qualitative empirical data from the Finnish
tourism industry, we examine the current wellness tourism offerings and analyse
how the service providers are developing their offerings in order to respond to
the expectations of future wellness tourists. The data reveals a certain
understanding of the experience economy logic and emphasizes the strong pressure
for constant innovation. However, it seems that the service providers mainly
just try to develop new products and services instead of truly engaging
consumers in the value creation processes. This highlights the strong product
and service focus of the value creation and the lack of real customer
centricity, which indeed forms the core of the entire wellness ideology.