Health Tourism 유형별 개념정립과 개발모형 적용에 관한 연구

Abstract

Health tourism is the one of the alternative tourism and exceedingly comes into the spotlight for the sake of live improves and the change of tourism desires. Competitive environment in the tourism markets all over the world and tourists' diversified desires require customer-oriented countermeasure by the type of health tourism. Currently, Korean government considers health tourism as the one of major political areas, which has been rapidly developed especially in South East Asia including Thailand, Singapore, and India. In order to secure competitiveness of health tourism industry and to develop health tourism products effectively, government has put efforts on identifying tourists' desires. In this context, the purpose of study is to develop the suitable products for health tourism and secure the competitive power of health tourism industry with matching the attributes of tourists' demand with the types of health tourism by the use of Quality Function Deployment(QFD) techniques into the process of merchandising deployment. To do so, the concept of health tourism are identified and defined through the previous researches in Korea and abroad. Based on the concept, the types of health tourism are classified. Then, In order to produce the optimal health tourism merchandising, the attributes of tourists' demand are identified by application of QFD technique and then matched with technical characteristics of the products by the types of health tourism As the result of QFD application, the service quality of tourism products is determined by the identification of tourist' demand, and the degree of importance of are identified by the weight of variables. Then the priority of the execution could be determined. This exploratory study provides the data that can be used in the tourism destination practically for the tourism product suppliers by the conceptual QFD model that applied by the types of health tourism. The results of research present the points of issues as follows. First, the concept of health tourism has not been clearly defined yet, but the types of health tourism have been identified and classified based on the previous concept. Then a theoretical framework for the further studies of health tourism was offered. Second, this study has a meaning to introduce QFD technique for health tourism merchandising. The investigation of the tourists gave the deep depth of knowledge to understand tourists, but it was difficult to operate and manage for the tourism product suppliers. On the contrary, QFD technique has an advantage to be more easily applied to the operation and management of the health tourism products. Indeed, since QFD is designed to reflect tourists demand fully, and the correlation between the attributes of tourists demand and technical characteristics can be identified at a glance through HOQ (House of Quality), it is expected that QFD can be a useful tool to make a decision for merchandising and improvement of health tourism. Last, the results of research will provide the useful basic data as the first case study that applied QFD technique to health tourism merchandising.