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

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.