Relationship Management in Spa Tourism: An Approach to Cross-Border Regions

Abstract

The practice of healthcare and wellness management depends on successfully informing potential customers about procedure options, service excellence, treatment facilities, tourism opportunities, travel benefits, and destination choice. As a tourism segment example, health, wellness, and thermal tourism is becoming an increasingly popular option for visitors looking to access procedures that are seemingly unavailable to them in their home countries due to lack of affordability, lack of availability. or lengthy waiting lists. This research seeks to gather and present the main aspects related to marketing and relationship management process in specific tourism context, in particular the case of health, wellness and thermal tourism in cross-border destination Portugal–Spain. In specific, in the Galicia Northern Portugal Euroregion, this activity still constitutes a vector of sustainable development, serving as leverage for complementary activities like healthcare and thermal tourism. The study has as purpose to 2provide a better understanding regarding the essence of innovation process and relational marketing: theoretical and practical implications, in specific contexts of health, wellness and thermal tourism in cross-border destinations. Regarding the methodology used here, this is a conceptual paper with a literature review that brings together the major components of innovation and its implications tourist perspective and relationship marketing (i.e., visitor perspective). The present manuscript intends to contribute theoretically to the management of innovation in specific tourism contexts (i.e., wellness, health, and thermal tourism) in cross-border tourist destinations (Portugal and Spain, specifically the Euroregion of Northern Portugal and Galicia). In the end, we intend to explore the relationship with thermal tourism consumers, suggesting a conceptual model. The model should be tested empirically in the cross-border tourist area of Northern Portugal and Galicia (with the partnership of four thermal tourism companies, as one of the main types of tourism common to the territorial space). A future study should include emotional factors. The new vogue of wellness, heatlh, and thermal tourism forces us to challenge and re-visit the power relationships that exist within contemporary tourism and the limitations imposed by the new coronavirus.