ABSTRACT
Thailand and Malaysia are in a Southeast Asia Region that builds cooperative tourism promotion under the ASEAN Tourism Connectivity framework. The two countries must utilize their unique identities to build differentiation in their sales and promotion schemes but keep their coherence and co-promotion. While Thailand has paid attention to Thai herbs for physical and mind therapy, Malaysia has put its emphasis on the spa industry. Moreover, the two have introduced integration between Phuket and Langkawi to provide effective health and wellness connectivity destinations. Such cooperation will help to boost tourism connectivity within Southeast Asian countries. This paper aims to reach a clear understanding of how each country uses health and wellness tourism to attract tourists both domestically and internationally so that such cooperation and connectivity will help to promote the industry. The study identified health and wellness tourism connectivity between Thailand and Malaysia. http://travel.earth/wellness-tourism-southeast-asia
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Chiranuch Sopha
Dr. Chiranuch Sopha has an interest and experiences in teaching tourism, cultural and history. She has conducted more than 10 researches over the past few years. Her researches and academic articles have been published in various journals at the national level of Thailand Citation Index (TCI). She earns her academic title of assistant professor in the 2018. Moreover, her doctoral thesis has been published internationally by Lambert Academic Printing. She also has been invited to supervise and examine thesis and dissertation at the graduate levels both Master’s degree and Doctoral degree at various institutions in Thailand. Her research interests are historical tourism, cultural tourism, ethnic tourism, and health tourism.
Chompunuch Jittithavorn
Dr. Chompunuch Jittithavorn earns her doctoral degree in tourism management from the University of Otago, New Zealand. She has been in the teaching tourism and hotel management for over 15 years. She has conducted and published her research papers in various journal in Thailand that list on the Thailand Citation Index (TCI). In the past few years, Dr. Jittithavorn also serves the government research organization under the Office of the Prime Minister so called Thailand Research Fund (TRF) as research project coordinator. Her responsibility is to provide research funding and coordinate the research meetings and publications for the development of researches within the tourism and hospitality field. Her major research interests are tourism and hotel marketing, health and wellness tourism, and Meeting, Incentive, Convention, and Exhibition Industry (MICE Industry).
Timothy J. Lee
Dr Timothy J. Lee has published more than 96 refereed articles in journals (including 70+ in the SSCI-indexed), 30 book (chapters), and 70 conference proceedings. He serves as an editorial board member in ten quality international academic journals including Tourism Management and Journal of Travel Research. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Tourism Sciences. His main research interests are health-oriented tourism; ethnic issues in the tourism and hospitality industry; and tourism / hospitality development, which incorporates East Asian standards.