New report on Thailand medical tourism
A new report has just been released titled “Thailand Medical Tourism Market (Spending) Analysis & Forecast” which covers current statistics and estimates to the year 2018. The report isn’t free, so if you are curious and have 948 Euros (whoa, what?) you could pick up a copy. No doubt reports like this are costly to research and produce, but most people in the industry already have access to a lot of information. Maybe it is more of a convenience fee to pull it all together in a nicely packaged report.
They do give a couple of teaser stats in the sales pitch, including the expectation that Thailand will receive more than one million medical tourists in 2013. They also list the top 15 sources of medical tourists to Thailand as:
1. Japan
2. United States
3. South Asia Region
4. Britain
5. Middle East
6. Asian Region
7. Taiwan & China
8. Germany
9. Australia
10. France
11. South Korea
12. Canada
13. East Europe
14. Scandinavia
15. Other Countries
The table of contents indicates they have a breakdown of each source country/region’s tourists by visits and spending. That might be quite valuable if you have a inbound medical tourism destination and want to cater to particular nationalities.
One thing I find surprising based on my limited observations is that Middle Eastern medical tourists are down at number five on the list. The last few times I visited Bumrungrad Hospital it appeared that that was the single most numerous patient demographic. I had read previously that the hospital had even opened a special wing with special staff to cater to this group.
The list in this research report says Japanese are the most numerous medical tourists to Thailand. I wonder what the backstory is on that. I don’t see much written about Japan’s health care industry. The U.S. gets all the headlines currently while the U.K., Canada and some EU countries are often mentioned. It might be worth some research to see what is driving so many Japanese to visit Thailand for medical treatment.