Transformative Tourism Labor: The Wellness Healer’s Quest for Well-Being

While facilitating tourists’ personal transformation, wellness healers simultaneously navigate their own quest for well-being in delivering wellness tourism services. However, existing research predominantly focuses on tourists’ psychological transformation, while the well-being of wellness healers who provide socioemotional labor often remains understudied. Grounded in the Stimulus-Organism-Response theory, this study aims to examine how social job characteristics influence wellness healers’ well-being within wellness tourism workplaces. A quantitative design and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) approach were implemented, with data collected from 312 wellness healers across tourism destinations. Results demonstrate that social job characteristics have substantial positive impacts on wellness healers’ mental health, social skills, and well-being. Social skills not only directly improve mental health but also serve as mediating factors connecting social job characteristics to well-being. The fsQCA results reveal three configurations that lead to high well-being. These findings advance tourism theory by clarifying the psychological mechanisms underlying sustainable service delivery in experience-based tourism. For practice, they offer destination managers evidence-based strategies for designing supportive tourism workplaces that enhance both healer well-being and tourism experience quality, ultimately contributing to destination competitiveness through sustainable human resource practices.