Critical success factors of spa-wellness construction project management

Ever since the modern life style with stress and malnutrition habits, has negative effect on people's health and their life quality, it has become inevitable for people to seek ways to recover their heath, maintain their health state and for better life quality. Spa-Wellness facilities can offer opportunities to cover these needs. Word sense of Spa-Wellness can have better expression for this purpose while spa means health from water and wellness stands for vitality. Increasing trend of demand and popularity for Spa-Wellness facilities have grate influence on developing a niche market and contributing to growth of national economy by advancing numbers of these facilities. Cross-border and domestic investors, raw material and equipment suppliers, companies that make construction application and decoration companies, spa operator enterprises and consultant companies that specialized at several different fields, competes to take a part from this growing niche market and seeks to create successful Spa-Wellness facilities. In Turkish culture, equivalent concept for Spa-Wellness corresponds to historical presence of traditional Turkish bathhouses and thermal springs. Lack of maintenance and restoration of these traditional bathhouses and thermal springs eventually have caused to become worn-out, dilapidated and abandoned places. Today Spa-Wellness notion has become a universal concept with a representation of modern synthesis of different historical culture. Modern Spa-Wellness practices is a mixture of worldwide traditional bathing cultures like Ottoman bathhouses, Russian Baths, Finnish Saunas, Indian Ayurvedas, Japanese Onsens, Chinese alternative medical therapies. Consequently growing with diversity of contents like bathhouses, thermal pools, saunas etc. Modern Spa-Wellness facilities starts to overtake the traditional bathhouses and thermal spring facilities. Modern Spa-Wellness facilities are relatively new formation and it can be said that these facilities has a fifteen to twenty years background on the countrywide. As the numbers of Spa-Wellness facilities are growing with its popularity and demand, need for the expertise and knowledge in the industry is also increasing. However; misplaced decisions in investment phases due to the lack of knowledge, missing in design and construction or wrong implementations than subsequent misleading operational business strategies has had consequences that could harm the prestige of the industry. Although there had been a negative impression on the industry, recently it has been important target to create successful and prestigious Spa-Wellness facilities by all the stakeholders of the industry by realizing that it has an important support to national economy and taking a considerable amount of share from the tourism revenue. For assuming a Spa-Wellness facility is successful, it is important to provide high quality of service, customer satisfaction and profitability of the business. However, the fact that a Spa-Wellness facility can meet said success criteria depends on many critical factors. All stakeholders from the industry should look from a broad perspective to consider these critical factors as their field of responsibilities meet with any of it and they should take any actions to fulfill these criteria. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to define and determine the critical success factors for construction project management phases of Spa-Wellness projects. Being successful in Spa-Wellness industry as well as applicable to every other industries, the foundation is to recognize Spa-Wellness concepts first and to understand its origins and nature. In this context, within the scope of the thesis by performing a literature search, definition for conceptual boundaries of "Spa" and "Wellness", spatial characteristics, global and local trends that guide the industry, historical development processes, and current state of the industry has included. Thus, it is aimed to provide a vision to the stakeholders of the industry with an academic point of view. Following the general information about Spa-Wellness, Spa-Wellness construction projects are discussed. Spa-Wellness projects are made up of special functional spaces that require expertise, and therefore they have their own unique dynamics and challenges. Project management phases and field of knowledge that enable projects to be successfully have been conducted customized for Spa-Wellness projects by performing literature search. Project life cycle of Spa-Wellness projects are defined under three topics of pre-construction phases, construction phases and post-construction phases. Following the definitions and explanations of project management phases according to the related literature, Spa-Wellness project phases have been investigated by case study approach on a couple of original Spa-Wellness projects. Since Spa-Wellness projects require deep expertise, this is required to have specialists in the relevant fields for the stakeholders of the industry. In this context, small scale and large-scale specialized companies have been established to provide services such as consultancy, creating design projects, construction, manufacturing, product suppling, technical service and project management support. In case studies, one of the companies in the industry has been contacted to be informed about the projects, which are involved in. This model company is selected due to it was involved in several projects and considered as a role model for industry with its references, annual business volume and technical staff. Within the context of case studies, selected model projects represent Spa-Wellness projects with different kinds of characteristics. Project management phases of these models are discrepant due to differences in the year that is constructed, construction methods, and design concepts, area of surfaces, project application budgets, organizational schemes and working schedules. In order to characterize model projects, they are investigated and project information are classified under three sub topics of pre-construction phases, construction phases and post-construction phases. With the directions compiled from literature search, critical success factors are extracted and defined from the original Spa-Wellness project case studies, than these success factors are discussed. In the conclusion chapter of this thesis, findings from the research in former chapters and by evaluating experiences and knowledge derived from the case studies, these critical success factors are organized as a checklist to guide with a knowledge for the future stakeholders of Spa-Wellness projects. The influence of this study to draw attention to the importance of the Spa-Wellness projects that are increasing amount of number with its popularity and increasing demand. In addition, another influence is contribute to the development of the industry by determining the critical success factors in the construction project management of Spa-Wellness projects.