BACKGROUND When seeking care at international hospitals and clinics, medical tourists are often accompanied by family members, friends, or other caregivers. Such caregiver-companions assume a variety of roles and responsibilities and typically offer physical assistance, provide emotional support, and aid in decision-making and record keeping as medical tourists navigate unfamiliar environments....

Health tourism is a profitable and competitive industry, which includes both medical and wellness tourism. This research intends to identify and analyze the determinants of medical tourism expansion in Iran. To this end, first, 384 questionnaires were distributed among medical tourists visiting selected private hospitals in Tehran, and medical tourism experts in both private and public sectors ...

This study examines what factors affects tourists’ intention to use tourism websites designed by local governments to increase the exposure of local tourism. The study relies on the Technology Acceptance Model to assess the advantages and disadvantages of a specific tourism website and to examine the reasons that motivate tourists to use online tourism websites for travel information searches. ...

Tourism is becoming an important sector with a great impact on economic development. Tourists form a heterogeneous group of visitors with significantly different spending patterns. This paper addresses the economic importance of a particular class of tourists, viz. those visiting friends and relatives (VFR). After a review of the literature, this paper offers an empirical case study of VFR tour...

Distribution platforms of apps help tourists to select the most supportive apps. These platforms represent information sources offering fruitful input for app designers and marketers designing apps. This study analyzed 240 travels enhancing app reviews based on reviews topics, furthermore making a distinction between price and app category. Interestingly, price shows to be a discriminative issu...

Bioclimate conditions at Sun Moon Lake, one of Taiwan's most popular tourist destinations, are presented. Existing tourism-related climate is typically based on mean monthly conditions of air temperature and precipitation and excludes the thermal perception of tourists. This study presents a relatively more detailed analysis of tourism climate by using a modified thermal comfort range for both ...

 “Flows” is related with the specialisation of that region to attract a certain group among those on which we focused our analysis (3 “cohorts” of migrants classified by age groups through a demographic model), traditional tourists disaggregated by international and domestic, and “unconventional tourists” (captured for the moment by the “Erasmus students” category). The classes derived from th...

When tourists visit a city or region, they usually cannot visit every point of interest available as they are constrained in time and budget. Tourist recommender applications help tourists by facilitating personal selection. Providing adequate tour scheduling support for these kinds of applications is a daunting task for the application developer. The objective of this article is to demonstrate...

The number of tourists to recreation areas has increased dramatically, leading to a growing concern about the congestion phenomena in these areas. Since the information provision has been introduced to reduce the congestion, its potential benefits as well as its drawbacks have been discussed controversially. In this work, we address a basic recreation area scenario with different patterns of in...