Abstract:
The objectives of this research, a cross-sectional study, were twofold: 1) to investigate the factor structure of medical tourism perception among Chinese tourists, 2) to investigate the correlation between medical tourism perception and demographic, health characteristics among Chinese tourists. The data were analysed by performing Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) with varimax rotation method. The questionnaire was distributed to the samples covering 481 Chinese tourists currently travelling to Thailand through travel agency as tour group and as Free Individual Tourists (FIT). The purposive sampling technique, a non-probability sampling, was used for data collection. The research findings can be summarized as follows: a) the Chinese tourists’perception for medical services consists of 4 factors: 1) country environment 2) tourism destination 3) medical tourism cost and 4) medical facility and services, b) the tourists’education level correlated with total perception, tourism destination, medical tourism cost and medical tourism facility and services, the coefficient correlation constituted -0.27; -0.20; -0.14 and -0.36, respectively. Besides, the results indicated that the structure of Chinese tourists’ perception towards medical tourism services corresponded to the previous studies. Worth pointing out is that, the samples’level of education has negative correlation to their medical tourism services perception. It is recommended that the further study of medical tourism should focus on the following aspects: 1. the role of medical intermediaries in medical tourism, 2. the economic impacts of medical tourism on developing countries and, last but not least, the steady increase of medical tourism costs and services in developed countries.
