Health Tourism Competitiveness - A Complex Approach

Abstract

Health tourism plays an important role in regional development - mainly in settlement development plans. This paper offers a composite competitiveness index for settlements - an index elaborated on the basis of general competitiveness theories, but which also utilises relevant factors of tourism competitiveness. Our analysis is limited to settlements with medicinal and thermal baths from two Hungarian regions, West Transdanubia and South Transdanubia. The former is a central region from the perspective of tourist flows and the latter is a peripheral region - which entails more opportunities for analysis. After a short review of currently recognised theoretical models, a composite index was constructed. The study attempts to explain the methodology of index-construction and the figures analysed; we finally analyse the results at sub-index level. The focus of the article is to demonstrate relevant factors of tourism competitiveness and to show the first results - basically to prepare for further, deeper investigation. The study is published in accordance with OTKA-project No. 106283.