Understanding the behaviour of medical tourists: implications for strategy development

Strategy and policy development for medical tourism largely depends on knowledge and understanding of the behavioral intentions of patients for cross-border travel to seek healthcare services. This study utilizes the Extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) and decision tree models to explore the behavioral intentions of medical tourists and identify key factors for predicting medical tourism adoption decisions by patients. Safety expectancy and waiting time are found to be the most influential features for the prediction of behavioral intention and adoption behavior. Though social influence and price-value are found to be very important in predicting behavioral intentions, these features become redundant in predicting medical tourism adoption behavior. This study also reveals that medical tourists rarely consider recreational benefits as a supplementary service besides health services; rather, they decide to pursue medical services based on the primary healthcare service itself. This finding can provide deep knowledge to develop policies and strategies for medical tourism. Highlights An expanded conceptual framework is proposed to explore medical tourism. Six major factors emerged as determinants of tourists’ behavioral intentions. Impact of effort expectancy on behavioral intention is insignificant. Safety expectancy and waiting time are dominant predictors of behavioral intention. No significant impact of hedonic urge on medical tourism adoption behaviour.