LIMITATIONS AND DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES OF DENTAL TOURISM: THE CASE OF CROATIA

Abstract

Many countries are developing dental tourism as a major segment of the growing medical tourism in the world. In Europe dental tourists represent more than 30% of all medical tourists. The objective of this paper is to understand dental tourism in Croatia from the perspective of dental providers by identifying limitation and opportunities in providing dental tourism services. In order to get an overview of the dental market in Croatia from the clinics involved, two researches were conducted. The first was conducted by a systematic review of leading private dental clinics websites and the second via an online survey in October 2018. The findings show that Croatia’s market identity is based mainly on excellent price-quality ratio of products and services in dental care, staff competence, high professional standards, lower prices and quality of support services. According to the opinion of dental clinics managers, the main limitations on the development of dental tourism in Croatia are lack of EU funding and incentive measures for the development of medical tourism, inadequate promotion of dental tourism, and lack of strategic planning and development vision at the national level. For further development it is extremely important to carry out accreditation and international certification of clinics and to continuously invest in employee training, quality of services and equipment/technology. The findings also point out that Croatia must build competitive advantage on dental treatment with tourism experience as a product. The quality of Croatian supporting tourist facilities add value to the core product and help to differentiate it from the competition.