The E-Tour Facilitator Platform Supporting an Innovative Health Tourism Marketing Strategy

Constantinos Halkiopoulos (), Eleni Dimou, Aristotelis Kompothrekas, Giorgos Telonis and Basilis Boutsinas
Additional contact information
Constantinos Halkiopoulos: MISBILAB, University of Patras
Eleni Dimou: MISBILAB, University of Patras
Aristotelis Kompothrekas: MISBILAB, University of Patras
Giorgos Telonis: MISBILAB, University of Patras
Basilis Boutsinas: MISBILAB, University of Patras

A chapter in Culture and Tourism in a Smart, Globalized, and Sustainable World, 2021, pp 609-623 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Health tourism is a special form of tourism that refers to international patients who wish to combine diagnosis, prevention, or treatment with a holiday. In health tourism marketing, services are designed, produced, and promoted in the market to meet specific both health and tourism need or desires of the people who want and can accept them. In general, the rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in tourism sector has led to new touristic and thematic tourism products tailored to the preferences and characteristics of the tourists. The hotel industry could benefit from its cooperation with thematic tourism platforms to address the seasonality, expand its target audience, and enhance the effectiveness of its marketing strategy. Nevertheless, most tourism providers in Greece, being small family businesses, lack the necessary information and communication technologies (and inherent technologies) to become globally competitive. Given the growing trend in the interest in health tourism, this paper aims to present the case of “e-Tour Facilitator Platform,” an intelligent information system aiming at supporting an Innovative Health Tourism Strategy. The platform focuses on the end-users, namely the patients/tourists, matching their profile to characteristics of both medical and tourism services. It exploits state-of-the-art machine learning techniques in order both to help end-users to view/select the proper health tourism product (recommender system) with respect to their profile as well as to automatically handle their comments (text mining) for evaluating purposes.

Keywords: Tourism marketing; Health tourism; Thematic tourism; Digital marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F43 I15 L83 O24 Z32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-030-72469-6_39

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030724696

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-72469-6_39

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().