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The Third Eye Medical Services

Will Patients Come To Your Medical Travel Destination, Post COVID-19?

admin
March 22, 2020
Articles Global Industry News Knowledge Base-KB News Pandemic

The natural reaction for countries, healthcare providers and medical tourism businesses is to wait out events, until they return to normal.

But expecting the flow of medical travellers to return to where it was before may be a major strategic and tactical mistake.

How much your country was affected, what your government did or did not do, and the post COVID-19 view of risk may heavily influence the potential medical tourist’s view of your country for the next few years.

For example, will people still want to fly long distances or will they prefer shorter trips? Will they want to leave their country at all?

Plan for the future now

This is now the time to plan for the future. You could do nothing and lock down the hatches and when things get back to normal, carry on as before. Or you could take time out, away from daily life, to make plans for how you can encourage your country, organisation, agency, or healthcare provider to get medical travellers to come to you in 2021/22, both new and existing customers.

WTTC proposals

Coronavirus puts up to 50 million tourism jobs at risk says the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). When the time is right, WTTC and the global private sector will be ready to help and support governments and countries to recover.

WTTC is calling for a series of measures to be taken, to enable the swift recovery of the sector once COVID-19 is under control. It will offer its support to all governments, and has made some suggestions:

  • Improve travel facilitation. Remove or simplify visas wherever possible, reduce the cost and improve processing times where practical, accept other visas when appropriate and introduce more efficient technologies for seamless and secure travel.

  • Remove barriers. Ensure that unnecessary barriers are removed or relaxed to alleviate pressure at ports and airports and implement flexible working visas for the industry in some countries with existing limitations, especially in hospitality and tour operation.

  • Ease fiscal policies. Reduce and remove travellers’ taxes, which increase the cost of travel, e.g. air passenger duty and airport, port, and hospitality taxes around the world.

  • Introduce incentives. Introduce relief and incentives to support business continuity for companies, which have been most negatively impacted by the virus. SMEs, in particular, will take longer to recover.

  • Support destinations. Increase budgets and assign resources for promotion, marketing and product development purposes in destinations when they are ready to welcome visitors again.

WTTC reinforces the importance of strong public-private partnerships and greater international cooperation to respond and overcome the challenges faced by the sector during the recovery from COVID-19.

The tourism sector has a proven track record of resilience in the face of crises and this ability to bounce back has improved significantly in recent years.

Medical tourism planning

Unlike the more short-term problems for travel caused by politics, terrorism, weather events or strikes, the COVID-19 problem is a medical one. It will be harder for medical tourism to recover than other tourism sectors.

Hospitals, clinics and agents may be able to use modern marketing techniques to help encourage new and returning customers. But they can only do that if customers feel safe travelling to the country.

Governments and national/regional medical tourism promotional organisations will have to work hard and spend money on tackling the following issues:

  • Smaller global market : The medical travel market is expected to be smaller in 2020 and 2021 , so what medical tourism customers there are will have a wide choice of destination. Organisations will need to work out how to maximise the effect of their marketing spend to make sure they get a share of the medical tourism ‘cake’.

  • A permanent change? The big unknown is if any change in the behaviour of medical tourism customers will be permanent or temporary. Will they look to travel domestically or to nearby countries rather than go on long-haul flights? Any plan you make must include allowances for different longer-term results.

  • Maximise spend : The medical tourism industry has many examples of spending marketing money in the wrong places (e.g. scatter-gun promotion tactics ; exhibition stands or attending unknown “international health” conferences ). But is that spending reaching the end consumer? Are you still using outdated websites and printed brochures, when most of the world has moved to different online options to research treatments? Are you still blogging, when competitors have apps, Instagram pictures and remote tele-consultations?

  • Target market : Are the target markets you selected in your 2020 plan the right targets now? It is easy to get locked into a habit of targeting what was the best market five years ago, rather than looking towards what will be the best markets in a year’s time. Check out opportunities by country, location, age, and a range of other factors.

  • Your offer : Is your offer targeted, logical and realistic, or more the equivalent of trying to hit a small target with a shotgun? Is the offer now right for you and potential customers?

  • Keep informed : As well as reading IMTJ, are you using up to date research produced by your country and others? There are many ‘copy-and-paste reports’ in the market that use historic figures but offer little or no analysis for the future.

  • Accreditation : Some medical tourism accreditation organisations suggest that accreditation is the answer to attracting international patients and some governments look like they are controlling rogue medical tourism agents by bringing in accreditation. While accreditation may help improve the standard of hospitals and clinics, there is however no proof that accreditation alone brings in international business. It is likely that the average medical traveller is less concerned about whether their medical travel agent has or does not have a certificate, and more interested in whether they are cheap and efficient.

Beware one size fits all solutions

There is no off-the-shelf simple plan for recovery that you can follow post COVID-19. Bespoke solutions for medical travel destinations are now vital. COVID-19 will move medical tourism into the next phase, where what works and makes money for Country A, will be irrelevant for Country B to adopt.

If you want to plan for 2021 and commission your own research or specialist strategy, you must set aside enough time to work out, in detail, what you want from it.  It will then take more time for a good analyst to work out the best action plan for your destination.

Source : www.imtj.com

🔖Tags: China Coronavirus COVID-19 Global India Medical Travel Wuhan
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