Determinants of health tourism competitiveness: An Alpine case study

Health tourism is of growing interest for tourism destinations and serves as a key theme to add value and to differentiate destinations’ tourism product and service bundles. In tourism research recent studies underline the importance of various forms of health tourism in the Alps. However, due to the fact that health tourism definitions vary greatly amongst academics one can hardly assess the determinants of competitiveness of health tourism products or destinations. This paper aims to investigate, both, destination management organizations’ CEO’s and health tourism experts’ perceptions of health tourism competitiveness in alpine tourism. Smeral’s (1998) adaptation of Porter’s model of national competitiveness (Porter, 1990) for serves as a framework for the analysis. The authors conducted a case study of health tourism in alpine countries gathering quantitative and qualitative data. The study was conducted in the German-speaking alpine regions, in Austria, Northern Italy, Germany and Switzerland .The results revealed that factor and demand conditions are the most relevant determinants of health tourism competitiveness and that health tourism is moving towards more specialized but narrow markets such as medical wellness. Furthermore, the results indicated that the main strength of health tourism for the Alps is the wide area of (medical) prevention. Therefore, destinations must focus on the sustainable management of their natural key resources which are needed to create competitive tourism products in the future