PRODUCT DIVERSIFICATION IN TOURISM AND WELLNESS TOURISM: INVESTIGATION IN THE SC

Competition raises in tourism market has forced tour operators to diversification of tourism products for creating product value. Diversification of products has the feature to determine tour operators succeed in tourism market. While rapidly changing life conditions has been pushing people embark on a quest of alternative holidays, on the other hand, leading them to have more expectation than a standard holiday. Wellness tourism is one of the types of these kind of tourism alternatives in reply to this way of searching. The aim of the study is to deal with catalogues of Germany-based tour operators like Neckermann, Thomas Cook, and TUI in the categories of destination between 2004-2014 and accommodation management comparatively and to set forth of the importance, development and possible development of the future of wellness tourism. Other aim of the study is to shed light on the expectations of wellness tourism that has turned into basic tourism product for many destination and accommodation operations nowadays as an alternative for the sea-sandsun tourism. As a qualitative study, this paper is the total of operations that arranging the data gathered by interview and observation, categorizing, discovering the themes and reporting the whole process as a result. As a result of the catalogues, it is ascertained that some German tour operators offer limited package holiday in shorelines for the wellness tourism in Turkey and regard wellness tourism as a supplementary factor of sea-sand-sun tourism and has not yet included branded destination for wellness tourism in domestic tourism as Sapanca in their programs. With the light of the data gathered, some suggestions are made as wellness tourism for diversification of tourism products in tourism of Turkey to increase product value.