Monterrey Mexico.- Mexico is in good shape when it comes to attracting medical tourism, but it pales in comparison to all the opportunities it loses due to a lack of joint efforts.
That is to say, each link in the chain makes its efforts separately and does not capitalize on everything that a patient and his companions who come from the United States and Canada represent, said Gustavo García, president of Skye Group and co-founder of Mederit, the first medical tourism startup in Mexico.
“The great failure of medical tourism in Mexico is because hospitals took on the challenge alone,” he said.
During his participation in the Third National Congress of the Tourism Industry and the Travel and Adventure Expo Festival, he explained that Mexico receives more than 6 billion dollars annually from the 1.4 to 3 million people who come from abroad.
These figures place the country in second place in the world in this segment, but Garcia said that it should have been in first place a long time ago due to its proximity to the United States and Canada, its competitive prices and its quality medical services.
He said that in the United States, treatments and surgeries are much more expensive and the treatment by doctors and nurses is much inferior to that here.
In Canada, he added, while there are many free medical services, the average wait time is 6.3 months for plastic surgery, orthopedics and neurosurgery, among others.
This makes Mexico increasingly attractive for patients and their companions, who often waste their stay because they do not have complete guidance on the activities they can do.
“But if you do not move to create tourist services for medical services, Colombia, Chile, and Costa Rica will beat us in the basket,” he warned representatives of the hotel, travel agency, and tour operator sectors and other tourism sector executives.
García recalled that he was part of the Nuevo León Medical Cluster and that efforts were made to promote medical tourism, but generally only the hospitals participated and when it came time to go to the United States to do the promotion, the rivalry came to the surface.
“As an industry we have to be together and not think separately… we have to create more experiences for visitors, let’s think about the patient who is going to come and what I can give him, try to get closer to doctors, to medical communities, talk to them, how can we create synergies with governments, private companies, the tourism industry.”
His presentation shocked the audience and proof of this is that José Manuel Ortiz, director of the Nuevo León Hotel Association, said that they have wasted the market and that the organization was aiming to create these synergies, since they have 18 thousand tourist-quality hotel rooms and many of them located in the vicinity of hospitals.
Sandra Pérez, director of Beraka, a company that provides various services to medical schools and doctors, and other representatives of travel agencies and tour operators also participated.
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