Aurelia-Felicia Stăncioiu

Dental tourism is a growing and emerging phenomenon that is becoming more attractive to patients due to its potential for decreased expenses, increased convenience, and immediacy of treatment. The necessity for travel is the primary motivation for seeking dental treatment due to the successful cooperation between tourism and healthcare. While dental tourism has been largely researched from the perspective of the patient, our research is the first research to apply a concomitant approach on dental clinics and tourism agencies. The aim of our study wasto provide comprehensive empirical evidence from the perspective of the dental clinics and tourism agencies in Romanian dental tourism. We used a representative sampling with an online questionnaire on 160 dental clinics and 32 tourism agencies. The results indicate that both entities have small amounts of information, but they are interested in investing, promoting, and creating a partnership to create a sustainable industry of dental tourism. Dental tourism could strongly contribute to the country’s image and help to prolong the seasonality of tourism activity by enhancing the strategic marketing of dental clinics and tourism agencies toward sustainable health tourism.

To be able to promote itself efficiently on the market, a destination, given the marketing perspective – has to be aware about the authentic and crucial elements of its own identity as being the only way to transfer, virtually and materially, of what it has best – the social-cultural and artistic identity (which, from a tourist perspective, represents its perceived image, along with psychological and artistic image of the destination). Hence without a detailed knowledge of this aspect, the promotion leads to a presentation of a distorted image of the destination which, in time, can distort the socio-cultural identity of the inhabitants of that region. To build the image of a destination (a notoriously long and complex process), begins with the need to profoundly understand tourists’ complexity of expectations (both functional and psychological) and, on their basis, to use these as attributes of the destination in order to improve attractiveness. In Romania’s case such an aspect gains more importance due to the fact that, after the 1989, young generation, an important population segment, seem to register a continuous and dangerous process of “identity erosion”, which over time could result into disconnecting from the essence of the Romanian spirit, not being able to understand or even ignoring sense of belonging, sense of identity, heritage and “tourism heritage”