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Health, Wellness and Tourism: healthy tourists, healthy business ...

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different aspects of the Tunisian medical tourism offer. The components listed are<br />

respectively related to social, emotional <strong>and</strong> epistemic values.<br />

<strong>Health</strong> care professionals can get more out of these value dimensions, for example by creating<br />

their own blogs or forums, around which they will be able to rally real virtual communities,<br />

thus improving access to information <strong>and</strong> creating positive word-of-mouth.<br />

The conditional value of the Tunisian medical tourism offer is based on certain aspects of<br />

Western health care systems, such as long waiting lists <strong>and</strong> the lack of coverage for certain<br />

operations. It would be interesting to communicate more about these issues.<br />

From a managerial viewpoint, the results obtained are a first attempt to enlighten managers on<br />

the major dimensions of the value perceived by medical <strong>tourists</strong> <strong>and</strong> on the relative<br />

contribution of each dimension to the perception of value. The goal is to better underst<strong>and</strong> the<br />

needs of medical <strong>tourists</strong> <strong>and</strong> thus to better guide their choices <strong>and</strong> marketing decisions.<br />

From a theoretical viewpoint, these results are a first step in developing a synthetic theoretical<br />

model incorporating the dimensions of both the perceived value in the context of a medical<br />

tourism experience <strong>and</strong> the usefulness of the Internet in the same context. It is also a first step<br />

towards underst<strong>and</strong>ing the key dimensions of perceived value <strong>and</strong> their impact on behavioural<br />

consequences in a medical tourism context. The ultimate goal is to operationalize the<br />

dimensions of perceived value <strong>and</strong> test their impact on satisfaction <strong>and</strong> behavioural<br />

consequences.<br />

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