The government in South Korea has changed the law to allow clinics and hospitals to own and operate hotels, to help promote medical tourism.
There are several hotels that have partnerships with hospitals and clinics, but the new rules will allow organisations targeting medical tourists to build and run hotels for medical tourists and partners, in their grounds or nearby. The change removes the anomaly where it was legal for hotels to own and operate clinics, but not the other way round.
The stem cell clinic at the Imperial Palace Seoul hotel in Gangnam gets one in three patients from overseas, up from one in five in 2013. It has brochures in Chinese and has hired a Chinese interpreter to help Chinese patients, who account for a significant portion of foreign customers. Anti-aging treatments using stem cells are the most popular services at the clinic, and patients stay three days and two nights on average at the hotel. The clinic says that the proximity of the clinic to the rooms is an important selling point. The hotel has been running various clinics since 2009 and these now include a dental clinic, dermatology clinic, and a cosmetic clinic
Other hotels partner with a nearby clinic. The Lotte Hotel in Seoul partners with the Samsung Medical Center and Korea University Hospital, who both send their patients to the hotel, where they benefit from discounted rooms and an interpretation service. The Plaza has similar partnerships with local cosmetic surgery clinics. The Grand Hyatt Incheon accommodates patients from the Inha International Medical Center, operated by Inha University’s medical school and located near Incheon International Airport. Korean Air owns both the hotel and Inha University.
The Ritz-Carlton in Seoul houses the May Clinic, which has one dermatology clinic and two cosmetic surgery clinics. While local patients make up a majority of their clientele, these hotel medical clinics are now targeting foreign tourists.
One reason why the government is tweaking and improving the medical tourism offering is that Korea’s currency has been strengthening—the won recently reached a six-year high against the US dollar—and unfavourable exchange rates may keep Chinese tourists, who accounted for 35.5% of the country’s visitors last year, away. Whether this will affect medical tourists is not known. Rising political tension between Korea and Japan has already reduced tourism numbers from Japan, by 22% in 2013.