With the collaboration of Spaincares, the trade show’s new section will have its own exhibition area, programme of workshops and personalised appointments with professional buyers
FITUR, the International Tourism Trade Show organised by IFEMA from 28 January to 1 February 2015 at the MADRID EXHIBITION VENUE, will inaugurate, as part of its next staging, the new FITUR HEALTH section promoted jointly with the Spaincares cluster. The initiative, which constitutes one of the trade show’s most outstanding novelties, emerged with the aim of putting the spotlight on an emerging sector with huge growth potential, that of health tourism in Spain, a country which has distinguished itself worldwide for its prestigious healthcare and renowned tourist tradition.
As health tourism thrust grows within the national tourist industry, FITUR HEALTH took shape following the participation, at the last FITUR staging in January 2014, of the Spaincares cluster. Among other stakeholders, the State Secretariat for Tourism, various Healthcare associations and institutes, travel and transportation agents, hotel agents, spas, the Institute for Spanish Tourism Quality and the Industrial Organisation School are involved in this cluster, all of them fully dedicated to boosting health tourism in our country as an incentive for promoting the Spain brand.
Indeed, Spain has consolidated its position as a favourite destination in this domain, thanks to its renown high-quality and highly competitive healthcare, which offers good value for money. In addition, according to a recent feature in Newsweek magazine, the country ranks third worldwide in healthcare quality, after Japan and Switzerland. Furthermore, our neighbouring countries are among the largest exporters of health tourism, with millions of people, generally with high purchasing power, travelling each year for health, wellness, preventive, diagnosis, rehabilitation and other treatments.
According to industry sources, on a global scale health tourism is already generating a revenue of nearly 7 billion euros worldwide, with an average annual growth of 20% and a forecasted global turnover in 2015 of 128 billion euros. This will represent for Spain revenue in this tourist segment of nearly 300 million euros in 2015, a figure that is set to double to 600 million in the following four years.
In this context, FITUR seeks to contribute to dynamising health tourism through the creation of the new FITUR HEALTH section, with the aim to respond to this emerging sector by fostering encounters and business between the supply and the demand sides. To this end, the section will offer businesses from this sector the opportunity to showcase their offering and to contact directly with potential customers, including hospitals and authorised health centres, spas, facilitators, medical insurers, health tourism destinations, specialised travel agencies and tour operators, certified complementary service companies, businesses associated with health clusters, associations and publications.
The FITUR HEALTH section will occupy Hall 8 of the exhibition venue, where the trade show’s business offering is concentrated, in a perfectly delimited area with its own exhibition space that will host the proposals of participating companies; a forum for analysis and debate accompanied by an intense programme of professional workshops and a venue for personalised and previously scheduled B2B meetings and appointments, with a comprehensive selection of national and international buyers invited by the event (facilitators and brokers, insurers, specialised agencies and medical specifiers in the countries of origin).
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