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The medical tourism industry has become one of the most profitable industries around the world wherein most of the countries exploit every effort to attract medical tourists to take advantage of its medical care benefits. The purpose of this study is to explore the determinants of medical tourists’ perceived services and their satisfaction for medical care in hospitals.

The quantitative method was conducted to examine the three groups of foreign travellers such as medical tourists, expats and normative medial tourists’ perceived medical services quality and satisfaction. Data from a survey of 266 respondents were analyzed using the structural equation modelling technique.

The findings of this study provide evidence that hospital accessibility and interpersonal behaviour are the most critical constructs that influence medical tourists’ attributes. Additionally, medical costs and health-care technicality have a significant relationship with the perceived services of medical tourists. The study also demonstrated that medical tourists’ satisfaction highly attributed to their perceived services towards the quality of medical care they received and experienced in the hospitals.

The results have important implications for managerial considerations at hospitals. Hospital accessibility is a crucial dimension to be measured at hospitals when measuring service quality. Service providers need to be mindful that all aspects of medical services are essential and need to be delivered satisfactorily to ensure customer satisfaction. Patients’ perceived services and their satisfaction is a crucial bridge in determining the likelihood of future return among patients to the hospitals.

This study has managed to convincingly secure findings to provide useful information and understanding of the hospital accessibility and interpersonal manner of health-care professionals at hospitals in Malaysia. Particularly, when any hospital offers quality services, they must consider the reasonable medical expenses that can be affordable by the average people and update their medical equipment that are necessary for technical and diagnostic purposes. By ensuring these, they can attract the medical tourists.

This study contends that customers’ perceived value can drive medical tourism. To demonstrate this, the purpose of this paper is to propose and test a research model capturing elements of perceived benefits and sacrifice that, by affecting the perceived value of medical tourism products, influence the buying intention of potential customers.

Potential medical tourists from China are tapped due to their cultural similarity to Taiwan, and the absence of a language barrier. Data from 301 usable questionnaires were tested against the research model using the structural equation modeling approach.

The results indicated that perceived value was a key predictor of customer intentions. As for benefits, perceived medical quality, service quality and enjoyment were critical components that significantly influenced the perception of value. Regarding sacrifice, the effects of perceived risk on perceived value were significant.

This study targeted potential medical tourists. Therefore, a validation using another large sample gathered elsewhere is required to generalize the findings.

The findings can assist governments in developing policies that promote medical destination and provide insights into research on how destination countries can make medical tourism a win/win option for themselves and international patients.

The proposed model is original; unlike most prior papers which take a conceptual approach to medical tourism, this study contributes to an understanding of the factors that influence the travel intentions of medical tourists through its empirical investigation, and especially in its targeting of customers’ value perception.

Following promising growth of the international medical tourism industry, competitions within the global market have escalated tremendously with increased involvement by numerous healthcare providers to acquire a share of its disposable income. The brand reputation would hereby play a determining role as a competitive strategy. Specifically, this paper aims to investigate the impact of social and marketing aspects on the brand image of medical tourism-based hospitals, alongside its relationship toward service quality. In turn, the influence of perceived service quality on satisfaction and the perceived value was examined, in view of further potential behavioral intention among medical tourists on healthcare providers in Malaysia.

The data were collected through a survey questionnaire among medical tourists, with 596 successful cases collected via 6 major private hospitals at 3 popular Malaysian medical tourism locations. Data analysis was then performed using both SPSS and Smart PLS software.

The findings from the present study acknowledged the importance of both social (e.g. social media and word-of-mouth communications) and marketing (e.g. hospital advertisement and price perception) aspects toward establishing brand image among medical tourism-based hospitals. Consequently, the brand image would influence perceived service quality among medical tourists; further entail positive impact on behavioral intention, with satisfaction and perceived value as mediators between both factors. Following PLS predict analysis confirming this model’s high predictive capability, it demonstrated close representation to actual medical tourism scenario in Malaysia.

This study is one of the very few studies that explored the minimally investigated territory on the consequential importance of hospital branding within the medical tourism industry; specifically through extending the literature on the influence of social and marketing efforts toward the formation of brand image.

This study aims to examine hospital image, perceived medical quality, relationship marketing and word-of-mouth as the determinants of patients’ intent to revisit private hospitals in Penang, based on the theory of planned behaviour.

A quantitative study comprising a self-administered questionnaire was distributed to domestic and international patients at the airport, private hospitals and hotels located in Penang. The partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach was used to analyse and test the research hypotheses.

The results show that cognitive components (i.e. hospital image and perceived medical quality) do not have any significant influence on patients’ intent to revisit, while affective components (i.e. relationship marketing) and behavioural components (i.e. word-of-mouth) are important in increasing patients’ intent to revisit private hospitals in Penang, Malaysia. Trust has no significant mediating effect between predictor variables and patients’ intent to revisit, but it has significant association with affective and behavioural components.

The findings provide insights to medical marketing teams in promoting and increasing patients’ intent to revisit their respective hospitals and for the governments to sustain and enhance medical tourism in their countries.

This study is one of the few studies that looks at the relationship between hospital image, perceived medical quality, relationship marketing, word-of-mouth and patients’ intent to revisit private hospitals in Penang, Malaysia. This study also explored the direct and indirect effects of trust on patients’ intent to revisit that was still limited.

Given the increasing dominance of medical tourism on the service economy of some of the developing nations, as a pioneering attempt, this study aims to develop a consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) measurement scale for the medical tourist destinations (city/hospital).

Following the traditional marketing construct development process (qualitative study, purification study and validation study), in the present study, two sets of large and independent samples were assessed to judge the dimensionality of the measure.

A well-validated measurement scale was developed as an amalgamation of four dimensions, namely, awareness, perceived quality, brand loyalty and authenticity to assess CBBE of medical destinations.

To reduce the financial and physical risk associated with the purchase of treatment, the customers may rely on “authenticity” of the service providers to select a treatment destination. The outcomes would help medical administrators/managers to focus more on developing “assurance” by increased reliability, responsiveness and tangibles to attract the medical tourists to a large extent.

The study is a pioneering attempt to develop a scale for measuring CBBE for medical tourist destinations. The study aligns with earlier CBBE scales in terms of the first three elements, namely, brand awareness, loyalty and perceived quality. However, based on predictive validity, the study puts forth five interrelated first order attributes, namely, “trust”, “value for money”, “quality of residents”, reliability and soft issues (like friendliness and ease of process) as contributing factors to a so far unexplored dimension, “brand authenticity”.

This study aims to explore the relationship between the perceived quality of services provided by specialist physicians and patients' attitudinal responses along cognitive, emotive and conative levels.

The SERVQUAL model was used to evaluate the quality of the medical services. The data were collected in a survey of medium‐level executives enrolled in professional MBA and executive BA programs in Israel.

The study shows that patients' evaluations regarding service quality do affect significantly their attitudinal responses. It has also found out that service dimensions relating to anxiety reduction and the desires to reduce perceived risk, namely the Assurance and the Reliability dimensions are the most important for patients in these kinds of service encounters.

The study should encourage service managers of health care‐providing organizations to use these results to ensure higher patient satisfaction. These results indicate that, in these kinds of medical service encounters, physicians should explicitly recognize the role of service quality perceptions for anxiety reduction and incorporate as many anxiety‐reducing cues as possible in the environment of such interactions.

The research reinforces the importance of patients' perceptions of service quality in medical encounters. The study shows that such perceptions are relevant for patients in medical service encounters of the intermediate type where such patients are treated by specialist physicians. It shows that such perceptions affect the levels of patients' satisfaction from such encounters at both the cognitive and affective levels. They also affect their intentions to act following such encounters in the short, intermediate and long time spans.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the dimensions of service quality as well as of service loyalty in the context of medical tourism. It seeks to demonstrate the conceptualization of medical tourism service loyalty (MTSL) construct. This research also attempts to examine the effect of service quality dimensions on service loyalty dimensions of medical tourism.

The dimensions of service quality as well as of service loyalty are identified using an exploratory factor analysis. Next, the reliability and validity of the quality factors and loyalty factors are established through confirmatory factor analysis using AMOS 18.0 version. The related hypotheses are tested using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The paper identifies eight-factor construct for medical tourism service quality and three-factor construct for MTSL. It is found that the treatment satisfaction dimension of service quality has positive and significant impact on MTSL. It is also observed that, overall, medical tourism service quality has positive impact on MTSL.

These dimensions of service quality should be viewed as the levers of improving perceived service quality with respect to medical tourism. Examining the service quality dimensions’ impact on customer loyalty for medical tourism sector can offer the industry valuable insights regarding which aspects of the service to focus on in order to improve medical tourist’s satisfaction and loyalty toward the firms.

This paper introduces the concept of service quality and service loyalty in medical tourism sector. In conceptualizing MTSL, the authors propose an integration of behavioral measures, attitudinal measures and cognitive measures. The interrelationship between the service quality construct and medical loyalty construct was established using SEM. This is useful for the healthcare manager to measure the medical tourist’s perceptions of service quality on these dimensions as related to medical tourism performance.

This research theoretically proposed and empirically validated a Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) scale specifically for Medical Tourism for emerging economies including recent findings from tourism theories such as gravity model and signalling theory, but more specifically accommodating political, cultural, economic, legal and social influences.

In-depth literature reviews from tourism, medical tourism, healthcare and hospitality domains are used to propose the theoretical model. The authors have used the lavaan package in R for the empirical analysis and model verification.

The research included, tested and verified the established latent variables such as “brand awareness”, “brand association”, “perceived quality” and “loyalty”, along with new observed variables for the CBBE scale from the theoretical perspectives of this research. “Infrastructure” has emerged as a new scale construct and “culture” was found to be a moderating variable for “perceived quality” in the CBBE scale, which are novel additions to the literature.

The research contributed to scale refining, latent construct assessment, and fine-tuning of the observed variables for the mentioned theoretical gaps.

This study aims to explore the consumer perceptions of cognition and intention to visit pilot zone of international medical tourism as emerging, developed medical tourism destinations.

Using a survey-based quantitative method, based on a survey of 439 tourists who have cross-border travel experience, the partial least squares approach was performed to test the hypotheses.

The results show that internal factors had a stronger influence on destination image compared to external factors. Among different factors, preferential policies had the greatest impact on intention to visit. Perceived quality had a stronger effect on intention to visit than preference. Geographical distance had a varied effect, with those furthest away in Northeast China showing greater intention to visit compared to closer regions.

This study explores the impact of multidimensional destination perception on medical tourists’ behavioural intention in emerging destinations by integrating the push-pull theory and theory of planned behaviour and tests how geographical distance affects intention to visit emerging destinations. Using China international medical tourism pilot area as a typical case of medical tourism emerging destinations for empirical analysis. This research offers guidance for branding and marketing strategies, contributes to a deeper understanding of medical tourists’ destination choices, enriches the theoretical explanation of emerging destination choice in medical tourism and provides valuable insights for destination recovery.

The purpose of this study is to find out the factors that influence dental travelers’ revisit intention (RI) to Tijuana, Mexico.

Based on the push and pull model, five constructs were included: quality service, price, supporting services, cultural proximity and quality information. The information was obtained by applying an online survey to a sample of 384 dental tourists in Tijuana, Mexico, who were repeat patients of a dental clinic in Tijuana after the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploratory factor analysis, average variance explained and composite reliability were conducted to ensure the validity of each construct. Multiple regression analysis was done to identify predictors of travelers’ RI.

The results obtained show that cultural proximity, quality service, price and supporting services influenced the travelers’ revisit behavior after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge on travel behavior in dental tourism after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, which has been scarcely studied. Also, RI was analyzed, focusing on repeated travelers to propose a model mainly for borders or frontiers where developed and developing countries co-exist and interact.