Hedonic and Eudaimonic Experiences among Wellness Tourists: An exploratory enquiry

This paper contends that recent developments in the field of positive psychology, particularly in the area of psychological well-being, in combination with Stebbins's framework of casual versus serious leisure, may provide a new perspective for the understanding of tourism experiences. Based on the experience accounts of three different groups of wellness tourists (i.e., visitors to beauty spas, lifestyle resorts, and spiritual retreats), the aim of this paper is to explore whether tourism experiences can be classified into hedonic or eudaimonic experiences. Aggregated experience accounts were collected through individual, semi-structured interviews with 27 wellness tourists. Thematic analysis deductively applied Stebbins's characteristics of casual/hedonic and serious/eudaimonic experiences to the data. The results found that the three wellness tourism experiences can be placed along a continuum between hedonic and eudaimonic end-points. Accordingly, beauty spa visitation was perceived as a purely hedonic tourism activity and spiritual retreat experiences were considered as almost purely eudaimonic. Lifestyle resort experiences were also seen predominantly as eudaimonic, however they sit more towards the middle of the continuum because hedonic outcomes can sometimes be recognised as important 'by-products' of eudaimonic experiences.