Abstract
Therapeutic landscapes encapsulate healing and recovery notions in natural and built environmental settings. Tourists’ perceptions determine their decision making of health and wellness tourism consumption. Researchers struggle with the conceptualization of the term ‘therapeutic landscapes’ across disciplines. Drawing on extant literature searched in nine databases, this scoping review identifies different dimensions of therapeutic landscapes. Out of identified 178 literature sources, 124 met the inclusion criteria of identified keywords. We review the contribution and the potential of environmental psychology in understanding tourist behavior to promote health and wellness tourism destinations in a post COVID-19 context. We develop and propose a conceptual framework comprising: (1) perceived goodness of therapeutic landscapes, (2) health and wellness consumption, (3) COVID-19 pandemic perceived health and wellness risk, (4) place attachment, and (5) re-visitation. We propose measurement scales and discuss implications and major issues in the immediate and post the COVID-19 pandemic to inform future research.
Highlights
Drawing on theories of humanism and structural and cultural ecology, Gesler (1992) introduced the concept of therapeutic landscapes and uncovered the healing and recovery coordination between place and environment (Gesler, 2003)
Our objective is to develop and propose a conceptual framework and hypotheses to present the associations between perceived goodness of therapeutic landscapes, health and wellness tourism consumption, place attachment, and re-visitation to therapeutic landscapes and the potential influence of COVID-19 perceived risk on these relationships
The majority of searched literature belongs to the field of geography (30.65%) followed by health and wellness tourism (25.81%)
Summary
Drawing on theories of humanism and structural and cultural ecology, Gesler (1992) introduced the concept of therapeutic landscapes and uncovered the healing and recovery coordination between place and environment (Gesler, 2003). Therapeutic landscapes are a combination of physical and built environments with human perceptions and social interactions that interact with each other to produce a sense of healing (Gesler, 2003; English et al, 2008) which generates happiness and contributes to the overall quality of life. Wellness and spa tourism is becoming increasingly popular with destination marketers offering a range of products including therapeutic landscapes (Wakefield and McMullan, 2005; Zhou et al, 2017). These retreats often have state-ofthe-art environmental settings and are well equipped with staff ranging from nutritionists, sports physiologists, and naturopaths whose combined expertise assist in co-creating healing and wellness experiences with customers (Ramkissoon, 2014). Meeting individuals’ expectations and perceptions give a feeling of satisfaction and happiness which are orthogonal to quality of life (Ramkissoon et al, 2018; Majeed et al, 2020a,b)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
