Digital Marketing in Health and Wellness Tourism

Abstract The dissemination of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has altered how society functions, creating the denominated information society. Consequently, digital technologies are significantly reducing information asymmetries between customers and providers. The evolving of internet-based applications improves marketing efforts by enabling organisations to implement innovative forms of communication besides moving for ‘co-creating’ content with customers. Digital marketing strategies offer marketers new ways to cultivate customer relationships, which can lead to increased customer loyalty. This is important because the effects of customer loyalty on health and wellness profitability are known to be significant. Therefore, this study discusses the digital marketing strategies that health and wellness tourism organisations must master to ‘conquer’ and retain customers. Considering that, a semi-systematic secondary research method was used based on the existing literature. This method explores digital marketing and how it can be adapted to the sector of health and wellness tourism. Essentially, this first stage consists of a reflexive work that uses different approaches and meanings to define conceptual analytical dimensions. The second stage consisted of an overview on Southern Europe real-world examples analyses; considering its possible contribution to consolidating our results and questioning, our option was taken. This chapter formulates a series of recommendations for the sector that may help improve decision-making in the digital marketing implementation and practice of digital marketing. The study also contributes to address the existing lack of literature. We conclude the chapter by identifying, providing and discussing possible avenues for future research.