Health Tourism: Challenges and Innovations

Dear Colleagues,

Health tourism, a collaboration of the health and tourism sectors, includes medical tourism as well as spa and wellness tourism, and comprises an emerging industry with steadily increasing trends. Ageing, the scarcity of resources within national health systems, urbanization, and direct foreign investments are some of the key drivers for the expansion of health tourism.

However, the formulation of regulations, the implementation of quality assurance frameworks, addressing transcultural and language barriers, and the development of strategic synergies (i.e., between the health and tourism sectors and/or between other alternative tourism sectors, e.g., sport tourism) are some of the current challenges. Thus, governmental bodies, health units, and tourism entities have to collaborate closely, aiming for the highest level of care and services for health tourists while ensuring sustainable development and a positive socioeconomic footprint.

This Special Issue aims to publish original studies and reviews, including both surveys and observational studies, that examine potential consequences and pre-requirements for the further sustainable development of the health tourism sector (e.g., emerging destinations) and impacts of specific strategies and policies on improving patient’s/tourists’ reported outcomes and experiences from health tourism services. Moreover, review articles that describe the current state of the art related to innovative treatment pathways that could be provided to health tourists are also welcomed.

Suggested Themes and Article Types for Submissions

In this Special Issue, original research articles, reviews, and short communications are welcome. Research areas/themes may include (but not limited to) the following indicative subjects:

• Architecture of health tourism units.
• Economics and financing of health tourism.
• Entrepreneurship and health tourism.
• Health crises and impacts on tourism.
• Human resource management in the health tourism industry.
• ICT and AI applications in health tourism.
• Marketing in the health tourism industry.
• Health tourists’ reported experiences and outcomes.
• Strategy and policy for health tourism development.
• Quality standards in health tourism.

I look forward to receiving your contributions!

Dr. Olga Siskou
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Tourism and Hospitality is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• health tourism
• medical tourism
• spa tourism
• wellness tourism