The impact of ecological environment on medical and rehabilitation tourism sustainability in Alanya

Humanity has traveled to diffirent geographies for treatment purposes, looking for health-related healing throughout history and recently continues to increase their travel demands. The rapidly changing living conditions of today's world, technological changes, urbanization have caused negative effects on the health of 21st century individuals who are moving away from natural life and gradually getting lonely. The idea of getting over the affect of all these negativities, being treated and staying healthy has turned the mass, creating tourism movement into a rapidly increasing consumer potential. In line with this demand, the need to supply diversified products and concepts for potential audiences has arisen including health services as a new type of tourism. This increasing potential has turned into high-volume tourism dynamism that responds to consumer demands with different treatment types applied in different countries. Health tourism, which has been developing at an increasing rate especially in recent years, has revealed a new form of tourism for the patients and the masses who want to protect their health. Alanya is one of the touristical areas with a high potential in the fields of medical tourism, elderly and disabled tourism, spa-wellness tourism and rehabilitation. Especially the convenience of transportation, accommodation and personnel infrastructure, private and public hospitals create a very appropriate region for tourists who travel for health tourism. Alanya, the district of Antalya, which I have determined as studying area will contribute to the development of health tourism in Turkiye with its climatic conditions continueing for twelve months, having products of high accommodation capacity as a region, a sufficient number of expert tourism staff who speak foreign languages. The ease of airline transportation and its accessibility from different countries will be effective in target markets' choosing. vii With this study, health tourism potential, medical and rehabilitation tourism sustainability have been investigated depending on the ecological structure of Alanya. Face-to-face, interviewer or online surveys were conducted with tourists traveling to Alanya and foreign citizens staying in their residence areas in the region of Alanya for a short period of time for this purpose and the surveys were analyzed with the exploratory research method.