How Do Potential Medical Tourists Expect? Assessing Expectation Based on Gap Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling

Abstract

Medical tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in a global basis, yet little is known regarding expectation from potential medical tourists. This study explores gap analysis based on importance-performance analysis and causal relationships among expectation, expected value, and behavioral intention. Data were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online survey panel and analyzed using SPSS 22 and AMOS 21. As a result, attributes in a cultural leisure factor have the least gap while those in a medical service factor and basic leisure factor have the largest gap. Furthermore, the cultural leisure factor insignificantly influences on expected value while the medical service factor and basic leisure factor significantly affect expected value. In turn, expected value influences behavioral intention. For theoretical implications, different regression coefficients of expectations of cultural leisure, basic leisure, and medical service factors on expected value are in line with findings from previous studies. Also, this study highlights cooperation between medical service providers and destination marketing organizations (DMOs).