Abstract

FORECASTING OF TÜRKİYE'S HEALTH TOURISM DEMAND
Gülsüm Merve GÖKÇİN , Nazlı KARAOĞLU
ABSTRACT

Tourism is a comprehensive industry consisting of accommodation, healthcare, transportation, food and beverage, travel agencies, and many other sectors. It plays an important economic role in many countries as it is a crucial source of foreign exchange inflow and investment, contributes to economic growth and development, creates direct and indirect employment, and has supply chain connections with other sectors.

In the globalizing world, the concept of "health tourism" has become more popular in the tourism sector in recent years, thanks to the freedom of movement, the variety of transportation options, and technological developments in the health sector.

Health tourism is a visit of nonresidents to a country in order to receive preventive and therapeutic health-related services, and other services on their health. Health tourism includes medical tourism, thermal tourism, and elderly and disabled tourism. Especially medical issues such as dental health, eye surgery, aesthetics surgery, hair transplantation, cardiovascular surgery, joint prostheses, infertility treatment, and in vitro fertilization treatment come to the fore.

The main determinant affecting tourism receipts is international tourist arrivals. Because countries obtain tourism receipts in line with the number of international tourists and the profile of these tourists. When the number of international arrivals is examined by the purpose of visit between 2003 and 2023, it is seen that the number of tourists coming to Türkiye for health and medical reasons has been increasing remarkably in recent years. The share of international arrivals for health purposes in total arrivals approached 3% in 2023 while it was 0.94% in 2003. In recent years, there have been model approach studies on health tourism demand in the national literature, but there are relatively few forecasting studies. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to forecast the health tourism demand for Türkiye for 2025/26. The dynamic factor model was preferred for the forecasting model. Health tourism demand for 2025 will be forecasted using quarterly data for 2003-1:2024-4. As the data is updated, the model will be revised according to the relevant period of the study. The independent variables included in the model will be: Health Tourism Demand for the previous period, Euro/TL exchange rate, brand oil unit price representing the transportation cost, quarterly GDP, and the share of investment expenditures in the health sector in GDP. By adding the lagged value of the dependent variable to the model as an explanatory variable, tourists' loyalty and recommendations might be measured. The lagged values of the independent variables will be tested according to their economic and statistical significance during model building. In addition, the effect of seasonality will be examined in the study and seasonally adjusted series will be forecasted as well. It is planned that the study will contribute to the literature on the forecasting of health tourism demand.

Çukurova University, E-mail: gmgokcin@cu.edu.tr
Malatya Turgut Özal University, E-mail:nazli.karaoglu@ozal.edu.tr