Determining the Service Quality in Medical Tourism via Structural Equation Model

The attempts of the individuals to be healthier by means of resting, exercising or going to thermal springs resulted with the emergence of a new and different type of tourism as 'medical tourism' within the tourism industry. In the environment of rapidly increasing competition, countries and health service providers make great efforts in order to take more shares from the medical tourism, which is directly related to the quality of the provided service and customer satisfaction. From this point, the aim of this research is to measure the service quality in medical tourism, reveal the current situation, investigate the relationship between service quality, satisfaction and loyalty and make suggestions. In this sense, the servqual scale, widely used in the health sector in particular, was taken as basis and implemented to the medical tourism participants. In this context, the observed result was that the most important service quality dimension for the participants was reliability and the dimension with the least likelihood to meet the expectations was sensitivity. However, it was concluded that there was a positive relation between the perceived service quality and customer satisfaction and that customer satisfaction played an intermediary role in achieving the customer satisfaction.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Health Tourism, Medical Tourism, Servqual, Service Quality, Structural Equation Model

The attempts of the individuals to be healthier by means of resting, exercising or going to thermal springs resulted with the emergence of a new and different type of tourism as 'medical tourism' within the tourism industry. In the environment of rapidly increasing competition, countries and health service providers make great efforts in order to take more shares from the medical tourism, which is directly related to the quality of the provided service and customer satisfaction. From this point, the aim of this research is to measure the service quality in medical tourism, reveal the current situation, investigate the relationship between service quality, satisfaction and loyalty and make suggestions. In this sense, the servqual scale, widely used in the health sector in particular, was taken as basis and implemented to the medical tourism participants. In this context, the observed result was that the most important service quality dimension for the participants was reliability and the dimension with the least likelihood to meet the expectations was sensitivity. However, it was concluded that there was a positive relation between the perceived service quality and customer satisfaction and that customer satisfaction played an intermediary role in achieving the customer satisfaction.

Keywords: Health Tourism, Medical Tourism, Servqual, Service Quality, Structural Equation Model