UK’s Cornwall is discouraging tourists to two of its beaches this summer. Predicting medical travel trends is also dangerous.

Time travel is where future predicted figures, at the flick of a switch, become ‘real’ historic figures. Ian Youngman, healthcare and insurance industry specialist, muses on the dangers of making predictions for medical tourism.

I have been watching old series of the television sci-fi programme, Doctor Who. While, thankfully, my personal rocket pack and all-in-one suit remain in the past, I’ve enjoyed the predictions from 1960s and 1970s about what the world would look like in the early 21st century.

What has this to do with medical tourism?

Well in my never-ending search for accurate medical tourism figures, I have found what I thought were several caches of pure gold. These were ‘official’ numbers and revenue for countries where figures had to date been vague. And stats on ‘current’ websites from respectable government departments must be real figures, right?

Let’s use a recent example. I was delighted to discover Country A had all sorts of numbers for each year from 2003-18, including by medical tourism and wellness tourism revenue.

Two things immediately started to make me suspicious. The first is that medical, economic and other details were only for 2011, or 2012, or 2013. The second is that the figures included 2018, but we all know, in reality, few countries will have accurate current year figures for any measure and, often, won’t have for many months or even years after the date.

Sadly, this gold mine was starting to look more like fool’s gold. I then took the precaution of checking some online articles.

The first problem was that the figures were not produced by any government department, but from an external source, and a foreign one at that.

The second problem was that the figures were from a report published around 2012-13. So, all the figures between 2012-18 were estimates but are now shown on the website as actual figures!

I’ve come across numerous cases like this. Those who have been in the medical travel business for a while may recall the story of the US outbound medical tourism figures from a reputable consultancy company, that were used for years as genuine figures. But when the company finally admitted their source, it turned out the figures were estimates from an obscure article in a newspaper where the politest explanation is that it was a rough guess.

The moral here is to look at medical travel figures in context, and if a government or semi-official body produces statistics, find out why and how they’ve got them.

But all industry reports try to predict the future, so why am I concerned?

Going back to Doctor Who, many of the predictions for 50 years’ time turned out not only wrong, but also laughably so. Perhaps that’s why I enjoy those old series.

Some might say medical travel is easier to predict. Why not assume that if figures have been rising, they will keep doing so?

I’ve found medical tourism to be a strange beast; external problems can cause countries that see growth for years to suddenly dip. Sometimes they recover; some countries never do.

Look at South Korea. You’d think that this is one destination where you could guarantee that figures have risen for years. But recently published 2017 figures saw not only no increase, but a significant fall on 2016. There are many other examples.

Over-tourism and anti-tourism – who could have predicted this?

Those of us who look at broader tourism trends to inform ourselves on medical and health tourism will have noticed that ‘over-tourism’ has increasingly been in the headlines. Some countries are worried that too many tourists will damage the environment.

Venice has put up gates to restrict cruise ship numbers; Iceland and New Zealand are cutting back on promotion as they can’t cope with too many tourists; Thailand is only going after ‘higher value’ tourists; and Palma has just become the first Spanish city to ban holiday rentals.

You could argue that none of these places are health or medical tourism hotspots, but then look again at that last news from Spain. The banning of holiday rentals is not just controlled tourism, but anti-tourism. This has the potential, a bit like the growth of slow food or slow towns, to spread across Europe.

The Network of Southern European Cities against Touristification is a European network against mass tourism. Launched in April this year in Barcelona, neighbourhood associations and activist groups have formed a SET network of 14 cities of Southern Europe. The network not only seeks to stop increased tourism numbers but will also pressure governments to establish limits to the tourist industry and even promote its decrease. Locals are understandably concerned that mass tourism causes rents to soar, local shops to disappear, creates low wage jobs, generates pollution and waste, and saturates the public transport network.

Many cities are expected to join the founders that include Barcelona, Canaries, Lisbon, Málaga, Malta, Palma, Valencia and Venice.

This anti-tourism movement cannot be written off as a few grass roots activists, as the principle already has the support from city and national governments, and tourism body UNWTO.

Several of the locations already involved are places where hospitals and clinics have been trying to increase medical tourism and have had government support. Local and national politicians will now have to choose whether to support the promotion of more tourism and medical tourism, or make some tough decisions to appease a probably fast-growing section of their voter base.

Those brave enough to predict future medical tourism numbers are often shown to be wrong. There are forces, such as anti-tourism, that if predicted in Doctor Who 10 years ago, would be seen as future fantasy. This is a trend that I have to admit even I did not see coming.