There has been a mass of tourism and travel sector initiatives in 2022 led by the EU, UNWTO and other global tourism organisations, and more is planned for 2023. But where is the involvement of medical tourism global and regional associations in these major projects?
In December 2022, the European Council presented the conclusions of its European Tourism Agenda, while at the same time, UNWTO joined the European Commission in emphasising the importance of jobs, education and investments to achieve their vision for a revitalised tourism sector between now and 2050.
The European Council conclusions are built on several years of work around “Tourism in Europe for the Next Decade.” They inform a new Transition Pathway for Tourism, developed by the European Commission in consultation with key stakeholders, including UNWTO. The pathway identifies specific intervention areas to boost the tourism ecosystem in Europe. Several of these areas reflect the priorities of UNWTO, most notably the importance of building and supporting a skilled and committed workforce.
UNWTO and the European Commission have welcomed the restart of international travel across the region. According to the latest UNWTO data, international arrivals were up by 126% over the first nine months of 2022 when compared to the previous year and reached 81% of pre-pandemic levels. Of the estimated 700 million international arrivals recorded worldwide for that period, 477 million were welcomed by European destinations, around 68% of the global total.
Digging deeper into the data, Europe’s tourism rebound is being driven by strong demand for regional or intra-regional travel. Research has found that, as a result of the pandemic, European travellers prefer to holiday closer to home, and heightened levels of insecurity coupled with economic uncertainty are only likely to reinforce this preference.
They have found there has also been a post-pandemic shift in consumer behaviour towards more eco-friendly or sustainable tourism experiences. The DiscoverEU initiative is described as a good example of a project which has succeeded in promoting smart travel, most notably through incentivising people to choose the most sustainable mode of transport for their journey. Young people have been among the most enthusiastic users.
Both UNWTO and the European Commission stress that tourism and transport need to work together to address the gap in tourism employment by making both sectors more attractive for workers. Their joint statement also notes the importance of investments in tourism as a means of accelerating the shift to greater resilience and sustainability.
Implications for medical travel strategy
This has serious implications for medical tourism, in that targeting Europeans to persuade them to travel to Asia or the USA may now be a waste of time and effort.
How medical tourism can become more eco-friendly and sustainable may seem tricky but it’s not impossible. It just needs new thinking.
In the case of transport, joined-up thinking and strong political and economic support are needed to both speed up and scale to greater sustainability. Medical tourism is mostly based on air travel so perhaps it should incentivise land travel by coach and rail when appropriate.
To replicate the success of initiatives like DiscoverEU across the European tourism landscape, the tourism sector needs both political support as well as proper, well-targeted investments. There is a need to see small enterprises supported through attractive business environments and innovative funding models, giving them the tools and the space they need to make a real impact. How medical tourism can tap into this need for investment remains a puzzle.
Europe cannot just focus on investing in technology or infrastructure, it is also essential to invest in tourism’s biggest asset – people. Medical tourism also needs to invest in its people.
UNWTO, the European Commission, governments and employers need to work together to make tourism an attractive sector to work in – one that provides decent jobs, opportunities for women, for youth and for people living outside of big cities – and the possibility to grow professionally and develop skills that can be used either in tourism itself or in another field. There is a need to make tourism’s restart and transformation more inclusive. Medical tourism has rarely considered any of this.
In this mass of initiatives for tourism in Europe, medical tourism gets no mention. Clearly, there is also a need for co-ordinated thinking across the medical travel sector focusing on the areas above.
Companies and countries paying to be members of global or regional medical tourism bodies may want to ask what these associations are doing, and why they are yet to be successful in ensuring global tourism does not ignore medical tourism.
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