Best “Experience” Practices in Medical Tourism

The principal objective of this paper is to demonstrate the best practices in the rising trend of H2H and Medical Tourism. The concept of “Experience Economy” expedites the merging process of hospitality and hospitals: patients are also travelers now whose needs are not merely commodity type of medical care anymore but a memorable wellbeing experience. Moreover, H2H optimizes the process of realizing excellent care, which serves as the fundamental reason for tourism industry. In the section of “Best Practices in Medical Tourism, Christiana Care Way, Starwood Five Human Truths, and H2H packages in Switzerland are selected to show how patient/guest experience can be made more interactive and less transactional. Therefore, although H2H demands the considerable collaboration from all parties involved in order to ultimately present the excellent care that customers, tourists, and patients want, H2H indeed carries tremendous opportunity for hospitals, hotels, Spa, restaurants, transportation, and more.

Privileges and Problems of Female Sex Tourism

This chapter provides an exploration of female sex tourism, or romance tourism, a global consumer phenomenon that has evolved over several decades. Amidst forward strides in their social and economic empowerment, many women in advanced countries still experience marginalizing constraints to their freedom, mobility, and expression in many aspects of life. Yet, scholarly research and anecdotal evidence suggest that some women have utilized sex tourism as a means to escape such domestic constraints and find entrée to myriad social and cultural privileges at certain destinations abroad. Moving beyond tenured, clichéd stereotypes that typically associate sex tourism with male consumers, this chapter brings to light the rationale, justifications, criticisms, and cultural issues pervading this institution. Despite its liberating potential for women, female sex tourism does, at least somewhat, rely upon and reinforce historically entrenched national and cultural demarcations that tend to marginalize the people (partners, families, communities) of targeted destinations in the developing world.

An Analysis of Hospitality and Tourism Research

Learning organizations (LOs) have been identified as an innovative practice essential for global businesses to not only effectively compete in today's dynamic environment but also to achieve and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage and increase overall firm performance. The objective of this chapter is to examine the current body of knowledge on LOs and their impact on sustainability practices in an effort to identify what is being done by organizations, where knowledge is applied, and, how systems are created to influence sustainability practices. In the context of hospitality and tourism businesses, the literature examining LOs is limited though a wealth of studies have been conducted in the mainstream. Using a qualitative approach, a content analysis was conducted to investigate its impact on sustainability practices in hospitality and tourism organizations. The results indicate that destinations in particular have adopted this approach to compete globally and to address triple-bottom line sustainability.

Role of Social Media in Tourism

Revolutionary development in field of communication and information technology have globally opened new avenue of marketing tourism and hospitality products. Major shift in web usage happened when Napster in 1999 released peer-to-peer share media and then with pioneer social networking websites named ‘Six Degrees'. This kind of interactive social web was named as ‘Web 2.0'. It would create openness, community and interaction. Web2. is also known as Social media base. Social media is incudes “all the different kinds of content that form social networks: posts on blogs or forums, photos, audio, videos, links, profiles on social networking web sites, status updates and more”. It allows people to create; upload post and share content easily and share globally. Social media allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content and experiences online. Thus, social media is any kind of information we share with our social network, using social networking web sites and services.

Local Resources to Compete in the Global Business

This chapter analyzes the role of local area resources in the global hospitality market as a way for small and medium enterprises to create a portfolio of distinctive resources to reach a sustainable competitive advantage position in the international markets. After a brief introduction on the tourism industry and its main change factors the chapter adopts a resource base and market-driven approach in order to identify resources role in shaping competitive advantages. The chapter discuss a case-study on a successful example of diffused hotel in Abruzzo, Italy, identifying the core resources and those needed to support them in creating a successful tourism product.

Advancing the Global Perspective of Tourism by Examining Core and Peripheral Destinations

Core and peripheral destinations are very significant to island tourism because of core and peripheral islands. Peripheral locations may be disadvantaged as they are isolated from the core or economic centers and from the main population. This chapter reviews literature on the complexity of core and peripheral destinations, their development, planning, marketing and management together with local resident's perceptions of tourists and the tourist's expectations. The South Pacific is defined and it's Colonial past discussed together with tourist motivations. It is becoming increasingly difficult for all stakeholders to agree on programs and tourism practices and that various South Pacific countries have different ways of collecting statistical data resulting in few generic standards to adhere to.

Global Perspective in Tourism Development

Malaysia offers a rich potpourri of delicious cuisines from diverse ethnicity. However, not much attention given to promote Malaysian food and the food seems to be ignored in the tourism industry. Furthermore, the concept of utilizing Malaysian food as a marketing means is tenuous. In this chapter, the image dimensions of Malaysian food and the effect of food images on tourists' satisfaction are discussed. Additionally, the influence of socio-demographic factors on tourists' perceived image is deliberated. Univariate and multivariate statistics are used to describe the obtained findings. The results of the study will significantly fill in the gap in the literature about Malaysian food's image and the potential of Malaysia being promoted as a food destination. Additionally, the results would indisputably provide better insight to the tourism and hospitality industry on the perceptions of international tourists towards Malaysian food and Malaysia as a food tourism destination.

How Do Pre-Alliance Motives and Strategies Affect Post-Alliance Performance in the Airline Industry?

The global airline industry has currently experienced major changes toward cooperation, where competitive advantages can be built via alliance memberships. The pressure of forming an appropriate alliance strategy is increasing because the airline industry has currently experienced uppermost shifts: intensive rivalry, rapid growth of technological explosion, environmental and terrorist events, etc. Despite positive pre-alliance motivations as recognized in most cases, after certain alliances strategies are formed and implemented, the post-alliance performance is not always satisfactory. Thus, the question of: how do pre-alliance motives and strategies affect post-alliance performance in the airline industry seems under explored. This study therefore looks into the triple relationships among: motives, strategy and performance. This study employs a systematic literature review method for this research topic. The review explores the main factors consisting of each triple dimension and then the linkages between them. Subsequently, it identifies theoretical gaps which indicate areas of further investigations.

Tourism Development in Least Developed Countries

Effective tourism strategies of a developing country can create revenue generating opportunities (tax revenues) and provide sustainable employment for semi-skilled or unskilled workers. Such tourism development strategies require systemic thinking and comprehensive investment portfolio strategies regarding the tourism industry as a whole, i.e. going beyond investing in hotels, but also including transportation infrastructure, catering, restaurants, safe water, financial system etc. In other words, the destination countries need to review their tourism value & supply chains and identify structural impediments to the full utilization of their tourism assets and facilities. This chapter shows how Least Developed Countries (LDCs) can define their tourism sector development and suggests a framework which can be used by a LDC to assess its tourism development potential. It can also be used by potential investors interested in investing in an LDC's tourism sector who need to understand the broader context of doing business in LDCs.

The Impact of Exchange Rate on Tourism Industry

Tourism sector that is increasingly important in the world economy, developing rapidly in Turkey and provides a serious contributions to country's economy because Turkey consistently has a current account deficit, tourism is an important source of income. There are many factors affecting tourism; it is clear that the industry can be affected by changes in macroeconomic variables, just like any other economic focus. In this context, it is possible that the foreign exchange rate and changes in the value of various currencies can affect tourism, especially with regards to the demands of the tourists themselves. By using the Johansen cointegration and Granger causality tests, this chapter focused on identifying the relationship between currency exchange rates and the demand for tourism in Turkey.