Improving services and raising competitiveness in Azerbaijan's health and wellness tourism (with considering the foreign experience)

Health and wellness tourism is one of the promising subsectors of Azerbaijan’s tourism industry. Based on various natural resources of high healing significance, a series of sanatoriums, resorts and smaller health facilities have been created in the country in the last 20 years. However, the existing potential of health and wellness tourism is not efficiently used. One of the main reasons for this are the gaps directly related to organization of services at health and wellness tourism enterprises. As the official statistics shows, the number of visitors spending ten days and more at these health tourism facilities purely for treatment purposes is low in the country. Problems available are due to insufficient and poor application of successful health tourism models of other countries, as well as imperfect marketing, insufficient promotion of therapeutic muds and mineral springs, and inability to offer more attractive tourism products in the market.

This paper explores both the gaps and improvement possibilities in services offered in the health and wellness tourism of Azerbaijan, with exploring and emphasizing the health and wellness tourism subsectors of the Russian Federation and Georgia, the country’s two neighbors. The research highlights the opportunities for improving of marketing strategy and the raising of the quality of services and touristic products in the country’s health and wellness tourism, with taking into account the foreign experience. It broadly focuses on how entrepreneurs in health and wellness tourism should operate to increase their competitive capacity and thus ensure the success in the market. The research is of practical importance to scientists, tourism managers, practitioners, entrepreneurs and investors.