Medical Travel Brand Management

Book excerpt: This new volume, which complements the editors’ earlier volume Medical Travel Brand Management: Success Strategies for Hospitality Bridging Healthcare (H2H), explores the multitude of medical travel services and discusses the integration of traveling medical guests with destination providers, hospitality/healthcare professionals, and travel service providers. The editors also address the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has made on the travel industry, which has motivated them to bring together major players, renowned authors, practitioners, and researchers to create this book to help prepare the medical tourism market to not only recover from the devastating effects of the pandemic but also to provide tools and cases that will help to structure successful destinations for medical travel. From chapters on branding to assessing accreditation and post-care quality metrics, Drs. DeMicco, Poorani, and their fellow contributors take the reader through the critical phases of the medical travel journey: pre-visit, travel, on-site care, discharge and follow-up care. The authors address critical issues facing medical, health, and wellness travel from both macro and micro perspectives. Presentations of best practices and strategies demonstrate how some destinations have built, renewed, or engaged various stakeholders to construct or enhance their medical tourism destination. Medical Travel: Hospitality Bridging Healthcare (H2H) © also showcases best practices and innovative ways of designing and operating a profitable and entrepreneurial practice. Quality issues, aesthetics, and legal issues related to inbound and outbound medical tourism are also presented. The book explores the evolving nature of hospital design and the complex relationship between people and medicine as manifested in the relationship of hospital aesthetics to patient satisfaction. Importantly, the book also includes a chapter addressing medical health travel during the pandemic which describes how the pandemic has revolutionized telehealth and the medical travel industry, which can leverage the advances made in digital health and telemedicine. This volume will be an important resource for the four main players at the center of medical travel: medical travelers themselves, government agencies, intermediaries, and health and wellness providers. The selected best practices, research, cases, innovative strategies, SWOT analysis, and toolkits address the aims of all stakeholders.