Santini: Build 15 Settlements for Senior Tourists

It is high time for Croatia to launch a more systematic, organized, and dynamic initiative for inclusion in the global medical tourism market, which is growing at an annual rate of over 15 percent and surpassed 120 billion dollars as early as 2011.

These conclusions were reached at today’s round table ‘How to Encourage Investments in Medical Tourism’ organized by the Medical Group and the business weekly Lider.

The action plan presented by the Medical Group includes the interest organization of all stakeholders in the health tourism industry, namely the establishment of a Health Tourism Consortium that has begun to gather all interested parties to ensure that projects come to life at a faster pace, specifically within the next 4 years.

The growth in demand for health and medical tourism services worldwide is driven by the crisis in the healthcare systems of developed countries, high healthcare costs,
long waiting lists, and the pervasive trend of an aging population.

– It is very significant that health tourism has finally gained a place in development strategies, but it is even more important and high time to see whether we have created a legal framework in the legislation of health and tourism as well as other sectors (spatial plans, visa regimes, etc.) for the development of health tourism to become one of the strategic directions of Croatia’s development, said Miljenko Bura, representing the Association for the Development of Medical Tourism and the Medical Group.

Croatia possesses undeniable resources, such as top-notch medical personnel and tourist attractiveness both along the coast and inland, as well as widely available natural healing factors that provide a good basis for a much more intense growth of this selective form of tourism. According to Bura’s opinion, it is essential to urgently adopt an action plan for the development of health tourism, which includes medical tourism, for a period of 4 years. During this time, all current spas and health resorts will undergo transformation, and with additional comfort and new services, they will evolve into health tourism destinations with new hotel capacities and new residents in the broader surroundings of such destinations.

The second part of this action plan, which can also start simultaneously as it requires longer preparation, should represent new health tourism destinations that will, among others, emerge in unused locations of former barracks and resorts. At the same time, the capacities of hotel wellness centers need to be enriched with new medical wellness services, thus extending the season and increasing the utilization of total hotel capacities.

In this regard, new packages of medical tourism services that provide such changes to hotels were presented. Tomislav Majić, a professional associate of the Medical Group, shared his long-standing experiences gained from working on such programs in Slovenia.

Good examples were presented, such as the island of Lošinj, which is certainly on the path to transforming into a health tourism destination and ‘island of vitality’. An investment study for the transformation of Varaždinske Toplice into a health tourism destination was also presented. The Varaždinske Toplice project envisions the renovation of the majority of existing capacities as well as the construction of a new hotel and medical facilities that ensure a significantly changed existing offer. The total investment is estimated at 80 million euros.

Economist Ljubo Jurčić assessed that we are still insufficiently market and business elastic from the perspective of support from relevant state institutions and that there is room for improvement. In this sense, Jurčić emphasized that the positioning of health tourism in development strategies must enable all multiplicative effects and positive impacts on other sectors of the economy.

Economic analyst Guste Santini pointed out the great potential of today’s touristically unattractive areas of Dalmatinska Zagora, Lika, Banija, and Kordun, which are particularly interesting for users and tourists of the third age, in which he would build 15 new settlements with a capacity of 200,000 beds.