Last modified: 2018-05-25
Abstract
Kvarner Health Tourism Cluster (KHTC), located in Western Croatia, includes members from medical, touristic and university sector, as well as accompanying services with the goal of creating a recognizable and competitive health tourism product on the local and international level. To better understand the attitudes of the practitioners associated with KHTC regarding inbound medical tourism, a questionnaire was distributed to the members in the summer of 2017. The questionnaire consisted of forty-four criteria that were presented in Likert scale format and four open ended questions. Sixty-seven percent of the survey participants were marketing managers in their respective KHTC organizations. Remaining participants were classified as non-marketing members. To determine if the marketing managers responded differently than non-marketing employees a one-way ANOVA was performed to compare their mean scores of responses to Likert questions. The analysis revealed that both groups of respondents, marketing managers and non-marketing employees, had similar means ratings for forty of forty-four question variables. A Pearson Correlation was performed to compare respondent years employed in the medical tourism industry and respondent ratings scores of Likert criteria. The Pearson Correlation revealed that some criteria were negatively correlated with rating scores. As respondents had less time employed in the medical industry, they were more likely to rate seventeen of the forty-four Likert measured criteria higher than respondents working in the industry for a longer period of time. Overall, analyzes show that employment “typeâ€, marketing v. non-marketing employment, had a lesser impact on the respondents’ ratings than years employed in the medical tourism industry.