Monday 24 June 2013


The City of Lappeenranta is heading towards health tourism

City of Lappeenranta. Photo: ProAgria
According to MTV 3 - the commercial TV channel in Finland. The city of Lappeenranta, close to the Russian border, is planning to dive into health tourism by building a new hospital. This public & private partnership is a joint project of Spa chain Holiday Club, Nordic Clinic and Eksote (Social and health authorities of South Carelia Province). The hospital is planned to open 2014 - 2015 and will be serving both local Finnish users and foreing health tourists (link to news).

Lappeenranta is a city in the middle of Saimaa Lake region with fresh air and beautiful sceneries. It is also a very popular destination among the Russian shopping tourists, as it is only a couple of hours away from St. Petersburg, a city with more than 5 million inhabitants.



Wednesday 19 June 2013

2012 A good year for Finnish tourism business

Visit Finland / Finnish Tourism Board reports that year 2012 was exceptional in tourism. We had more than 7.6 million foreign leisure or business visitors. This is more than 400 000 visitors (5%) than the year before. Also the overnights grew by more than 5% hitting new records.

The daytime visitors seem to be a growing segment and they come from the neighbouring countries like Russia, Estonia and Sweden, but surprisingly also the American cruise passangers and Chinese visitors have found Finland.


City of Naantali. Photo: Lauri Hokkinen
The expenditure was growing too, totaling 2.3 billion Euros.And where do the visitors spend their money? "Shopping, shopping, shopping" says the border interview. Of course accommodation and F&B services will have their slice of the cake too.

For many tourist Finland has been a new destination to visit. 77% of the Japanese visitors were new to Finland. Also French (67%), Italian (66%) and Chinese ( 65%) have experinced Finnish hospitality for the first time ever. Finland seems to be a destination for the FIT (Free individual traveller) segment as only a few travel in groups. Visiting Finland as part of a cruise has also been growing lately, although e.g. Finnair routes from Asia bring us visitors escpecially from China and Japan. Visit Finland website has been redesigned - why not have a look at what Finland can offer you!

The border interview was now conducted for the last time in this format. This is a pity, as for the past 15 years the tourism professionals and academia have been able to utilize the very comprehensive data in various activities. Statistics Finland is currently seeking ways of continuing the data collection in some other format.

WelDest project aims at developing health and well-being tourism especially in destination Naantali at Finland Proper region - perhaps in the future we can report positive growth in visitor numbers also in this tourism segment.

Wednesday 5 June 2013

German Leaflets are printed

We are proud the present the printed versions of the leaflet in German language.


For downloading the leaflets in the partner langueages have a look to Media & Publications.

Tuesday 4 June 2013

WelDest Research

WelDest Research is going on


The team of FH JOANNEUM in Austria has finalized the questionnaires for the consumer research and the stakeholder analyses. All the partners are at this point able to start with the interviews of industry partners, stakeholders and relevant persons. Also the research of consumer behave is starting in the next days. All in all about 1.000 answered questionnaires will be one of the three basic elements of the whole WelDest research. The second one is the analyses of the stakeholder interviews and the very important part of secondary research, done as a literature review, figures the third part of research.

Prof. Kai Illing, Bianca Neuhold and Maria Auer are discussing the next steps of the research.