The components and contents of medical tourism facilitator websites

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to identify and determine the components andsuggested content for medical tourism facilitators to attract prospective medicaltourists. To achieve this goal, a two-phase strategy was used. First, top facilitatorwebsites of medical tourism have been identified from googling seven keywords.Then, a Suggested content have been developed using extracted information andservices. All of the selected websites have been studied based on the qualitativeconcept analysis. As a result, different kinds of information and services wereoffered to medical tourists were identified and classified in three levels regardingtheir importance. Therefore a suggested content were presented to introduce andclassify the mentioned services and information. And after, the websites were rankedusing qualitative content analysis approach and their frequency and repetition wereconfirmed. The results show that in these facilitator websites, the concept of medicaloptions introduction has the most importance. Website facilities introduction,medical tourism introduction, the website introduction and the reviews of customers,were ranked next in importance.

Keywords

• attracting tourist
• conceptual model
• content analysis
• facilitator
• websites
• medical tourism