Introduction

Currently, health tourism is recognized as an important part of global healthcare and constitutes a major cross-border movement of patients seeking medical services. The health tourism industry has received attention in different countries due to factors such as reduced waiting times, access to high-quality medical care, and lower costs. Despite the various benefits of health tourism, there are many challenges, such as inequality in access to healthcare, gaps in patient protection, and a lack of standard post-operative care protocols in the city or country of origin. Therefore, strategic actions and various decisions must be taken to overcome such challenges. This study approaches health tourism from a marketing perspective, which can greatly help address decision-making challenges related to patients’ awareness as well as medical centers. On the other hand, the main focus in health tourism is to value the tourist as a customer in the field of health. Accordingly, this study, focusing on customer success management, whose key goal is to provide value to customers, has attempted to present a health tourism marketing model that has not been addressed by researchers in previous studies. Therefore, this study, by focusing on the value of customers (health tourists as patients), in addition to filling the thematic gap, contributes to the expansion of the literature in this field. Also, the present study attempted to answer the following questions:



What are the key elements of the health tourism marketing model with an emphasis on customer success management?

What are the main concepts of the health tourism marketing model with an emphasis on customer success management?

In what areas can the health tourism marketing model, with an emphasis on customer success management, be applied based on the identified indicators?



Methodology

This study is a type of applied research and, in terms of methodology, adopts a mixed-methods design with an exploratory sequential approach. Therefore, qualitative and quantitative methods were employed to achieve the desired results. In the present study, to provide a more comprehensive model of the subject in the qualitative section, two qualitative approaches, content analysis and thematic analysis, were used. Accordingly, the key elements emphasized by these two approaches were used to develop the model. Content analysis was used to identify key concepts in articles published in reputable journals, and thematic analysis was used for the interviews. According to the researchers, the combination of these two qualitative approaches could play a better role in identifying reliable concepts. On the other hand, the combination of these two methods could enhance the research model and improve the credibility of the final report. To collect data using the content analysis method, 21 reputable articles were first identified by searching the ScienceDirect, Emerald, Web of Science, PubMed, ResearchGate, and Springer databases, and their results were used to identify themes. In the thematic analysis section, 17 experts were interviewed to identify and code the subject. Finally, the codes identified through content analysis were combined with those obtained from thematic analysis, and after screening, a research model was presented. This model was then fitted and evaluated using the structural equation modeling method. Also, to collect data in the quantitative section, the opinions of 227 health tourists who had used the services of some hospitals in Tabriz, Iran, were used. Then, based on the results of the importance-performance map, the identified themes were prioritized.



Results and Discussion

The findings show that the health tourism marketing model, with an emphasis on customer success management, consists of three main dimensions: creating value, delivering value, and retention and continuity value to health tourism service customers. The first dimension comprises 7 sub-themes, the second 6, and the third 18. On the other hand, the model identified in the quantitative part was fitted using the partial least squares method. Also, the prioritization of themes was reported using an importance-performance map.



Conclusion

The introduction of marketing activities into health tourism represents a major transformation for tourism destinations in attracting people seeking treatment. For this reason, achieving customer goals and providing treatment tailored to their real needs was considered a major challenge for health tourism destinations, requiring careful management plans, strategies, and decisions to achieve a win-win approach. On the other hand, given that the concept of this type of tourism is related to the health of applicants and that marketing in this area is highly sensitive, it is necessary to be extremely careful in identifying the needs and demands of health tourists to prevent the waste of both organizational and customer resources. For this reason, to fill this important gap and take an effective step in this field, this study focused on presenting a health tourism marketing model with an emphasis on customer success management, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, to identify a framework for creating maximum value for customers in relation to the use of health tourism services. Accordingly, this study theoretically argues that most previous studies have focused more on separate marketing processes and the existence of health services; however, this study shows that perspectives on customer success management in the field of marketing should be very broad, because the presented model demonstrates that the existence of various aspects and central themes together leads to successful customer management, which requires a focus on health tourism marketing processes.



Funding

There is no funding support.



Authors’ Contribution

This article is derived from the first author’s doctoral dissertation at University of Mohaghegh Ardabili. The second author served as the supervisor, and the third and fourth authors served as academic advisors and contributed to various stages of the research. All authors approved the final manuscript and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work. The authors declare no competing interests.



Conflict of Interest

Authors declared no conflict of interest.



Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all the scientific consultants of this paper.