Trade with Greece
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tourism services at the same place and time, and
can be distinguished in:
● selective medical tourism, in which visitors trav-
el to a certain location in order to receive med-
ical treatment, mainly due to its high quality and
low cost (cancer treatment, organ transplanta-
tion, eye surgery, cosmetic surgery etc.); and
● emergency medical tourism, in which visitors
who spend their vacations in a foreign country
are forced, owing to emergencies, to seek
proper treatment there (cardiac episodes, peri-
odic dialysis etc.).
It is estimated that each year 5 million patients
seek medical care abroad, while the total turnover
from these travels amounts to US$20 billion
(€1,000 for transportation, hotel accommodation,
food etc. and €3,000 for medical expenses per
tourist).
The growth of medical tourism has been rather
strong in Asia (India, Thailand, and Singapore),
South America (Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica)
and Europe (Hungary, the Czech Republic,
Nordic countries, Belgium etc.).
III.
Up to now, Greece had neither included med-
ical tourism in its tourism development pro-
grammes, nor had set up the necessary (public
and private) institutions for attracting such visitors
and organizing the provision of the desired med-
ical services.
Nonetheless, the fast growth of medical tourism
in Greece’s neighbours (Turkey, Croatia, and
Serbia) and the need to enrich our traditional
tourist offer with new services, whose demand
has been dynamically growing worldwide, urged
the government to incorporate tourism-boosting
measures in its tourist policy mix.
The prospects regarding the growth of medical
