Measuring hidden demand and price behavior from US outbound health tourism spending

Jorge Ridderstaat

Tourism Economics, 2023, vol. 29, issue 3, 759-787

Abstract: The health tourism literature has covered several topics, but studies on the workings of health tourism demand and prices are still under-highlighted. This study investigates US outbound health tourism demand and price developments (real exchange rates) for 50 destinations, using outbound health tourism spending as a reference variable. The study applies the dynamic time warping approach, a sophisticated technique to assess similarities between time series, specifically, the outbound health spending with demand and prices. The results show that demand developments have similarities with US outbound health tourism spending in the short-run, with about 1.2% of all US outbound travelers being health tourists. Price developments have both long- and short-term similarities with outbound health tourism spending. The findings could help policy-makers in better managing the health tourism industry.

Keywords: health tourism; tourism demand; prices; real exchange rate; dynamic time warping; United States (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548166211067925 (text/html)

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:sae:toueco:v:29:y:2023:i:3:p:759-787

DOI: 10.1177/13548166211067925

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Tourism Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().