Understanding Family-Centric Wellness Travel: Motivations and Products

Family‑centric wellness travel addresses both parents’ physical and psychological well‑being (e.g., stress reduction, rejuvenation) and children’s developmental needs (e.g., health, learning, and entertainment), and has been growing in popularity in recent years, reflecting a broader societal shift toward integrated family health and holistic lifestyle tourism. While wellness tourism has been well researched, there is a gap in understanding the specific products in wellness destinations that meet the needs of families with children on wellness vacations. Guided by an expanded push-pull framework, this qualitative study examines the relationship between motivation and product in this context through semi-structured interviews with 52 Chinese families. It identified how different products that rely on natural resources, cultural resources, and services can fulfill the complex motivations of the family members. Theoretically, this study fills a gap by introducing the family perspective into wellness tourism research and expands the push-pull motivation dimension in family tourism theory. Practically, this study also mapped the products of specific family wellness tourism destinations, provided practical guidance for developing product designs for wellness tourism destinations.