A Study of the Impact of Medical Characteristics and Travel Attractiveness on Chinese Customers when Selecting an International Medical Tourism Destination

This research is to identify why potential Chinese customers prefer to select one medical tourism destination over another. We focus on the main factors of medical characteristics and travel attractiveness to estimate Chinese customers’ intention for medical tourism abroad. We also verify the effects of disease pattern in the decision process. With the data of 1,717 potential Chinese customers collected from the main regions of China, results indicate that in spite of destinations, medical quality, health reputation, and social environment are the important predictors of customer intention to seek medical service abroad. Results also indicate that there exist significant different effects of medical cost, travel attractions, facilities, and accessibility on customer intention to select the medical service in the US or Korea over other countries. Moreover, results imply that disease pattern does matter in the international medical tourism destination selection process. Implications are discussed for health organizations to make marketing strategies in international medical tourism markets.