Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Tourism: Theory and Practice, Engin TENGİLİMOĞLU, Editör, Yaz Yayınları, Afyonkarahisar, ss.1-20, 2023
Health tourism is a type of tourism that encompasses the activities of people travelling to a destination where health services are offered. It covers the travels of individuals in search of services aimed at maintaining their health, well-being, and wellness, which they cannot afford or have difficulty affording in their own countries. Tourists who travel with health as a priority often participate in tourism activities (Jagyasi, 2008; Smith & Puczkó, 2009).Medical tourism, a subcategory of health tourism, is the practice of individuals travelling to other countries to receive medical services that are unavailable or unaffordable in their own countries. These services include a wide range of medical procedures, such as medical operations, diagnostic tests and treatments, and rehabilitation. They also require the intervention of qualified healthcare professionals who meet the standards of the medical authority (Büyük, 2023). In fact, since it is associated with different medical specialties and includes various operations, disabled tourism, geriatric tourism (Büyük & Akkuş, 2022a; 2022b), cancer tourism (Büyük & Akkuş, 2022c; 2022d), organ transplant tourism (Balaban & Marano, 2010; Budiani-
Saberi & Delmonico, 2008), dental tourism (Turner, 2008), fertility tourism sub-branches. Health tourism and medical tourism differ from each other in terms of their scope, motivational elements, target audience, cost elements, duration, and revisit behaviors. For example, medical tourism includes medical procedures, health tourism includes both medical procedures and wellness tourism activities at the same time. In health tourism, individuals travel to protect, improving, or restoring their mental and physical health; In medical tourism, people travel to access medical procedures that they cannot access for any reason. While the target audience in medical tourism is individuals with health problems, the target audience in health tourism has a feature that includes both the target audience of medical tourism and healthy life tourism (Büyük, 2023b).