the Online Training Programme: Mega Trend &The Future tourism: Health and Wellness tourism with 4P model Collaboration under Sufficiency Economy Philosophy and Sustainability

           The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries – developed and developing – in a global partnership. They recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth.

        Health and wellness tourism refer to the trips that are taken by tourists with the principal purpose being to improve their health and/or wellbeing. Typically, this includes one or more of the following: physical fitness programmes, spa visits, medical treatment, health farms, beauty treatment and many different alternative therapies derived from different cultures.

       Thailand has gained a reputation as a high quality and reliable health and wellness tourism destination. Thai government has attempted to make Thailand as a global center for health and wellness tourism with several reasons to support that Thailand is one of the famous destinations for global tourists due to value for money destination and lifestyle tourism ranging from backpackers to luxury lifestyle tourisms. Also, medical and hospitality services in Thailand are among the top-class services of Asia and receive a good response from the many different countries in the world. The medical customers have as well other tourism choices such as beaches, sightseeing, culture, history, shopping to explore as their desires. the post COVID makes more challenges and opportunities to the health and wellness tourism in term of the recovery and the service development to sustain the requirement of the tourists who begin to travel again. This is the reason why the new strategies and marketing are required to establish and concern.

         

          Also, This online training falls under the theme “Sufficiency Economy Philosophy (SEP)”. The SEP is an approach for sustainable development which espouses moderation, reasonableness and prudence as development framework based on knowledge and virtue. The Philosophy stresses the importance of human development at all levels and also emphasizes the need to strengthen community’s capacity to ensure a balanced way of life and resilience, with full respect for the environment. As an approach and mind-setting framework, we believe that SEP can be applied to all 17 SDGs. Therefore, over the recent years, Thailand has shared with international community the application of SEP, our home-grown approach to sustainable development.

          The outcomes of this project are to be able to apply wellness tourism and concepts as a potential approach to the community development for sustainable development, to create a good friendship among participants and to explore the thainess including the traditional & cultural sharing during the participants’ time from learning and getting experience relevant to the participated course.

Project leader: ดร.นวศิษฎ์ รักษ์บำรุง, สำนักบริการวิชาการ