Evaluation of service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty of medical tourism

SUMMARY During the holidays, people's efforts to be more healthy as resting, exercising, prefer the thermal springs, spa e.t.c. has led to occurrence of a new and different form of tourism as 'Medical Tourism' in tourism industry. People travel to different countries for protect and regain their health and improve the quality of their life within medical tourism. countries and health care providers make a great effort to obtain higher benefits from medical tourism in an increasingly competitive environment. This is directly related to provided service quality and customer satisfaction. Hence, in this research aimed to measure the service quality in medical tourism, find out the current situation and make recommendations. In this context, has been used the servqual scale widely used in the healthcare industry and was applied to 223 participant who traveled to Turkey within medical tourism. Hypotheses tested for 22 veriables and 5 dimensions and measured the satisfaction size of foreing patients' expectations of service quality. Using Structural equation modelling, factor analysis and regression, significant associations were found between the five dimensions and patient satisfaction. In this context, have emerged that participants gave much importance to the reliability dimension of the service quality dimensions. However, found that there was a positive and significant relationship between service quality and patient satisfaction and service quality is an important antecedent of customer satisfaction. Also, customer satisfaction play an important role in ensuring customer loyalty and customer satisfaction has a mediator effect between customer loyalty and service quality. Key Words: Health Tourism, Medical Tourism, Servqual, Service Quality, Structural Equation Modelling.