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Drawing on value cocreation, this study examines health-care customers’ perceptions of patient-centered care (PCC) in hospital and online primary care settings. This study aims to address how are the key principles of PCC related, how the relationships between key PCC principles and outcomes (subjective well-being and service satisfaction) vary depending on the channel providing the care (hospital/online primary care) and what differences are placed on the involvement of family and friends in these different settings by health-care customers.

This study comprises four samples of health-care customers (Sample 1 n = 272, Sample 2 n = 278, Sample 3 n = 275 and Sample 4 n = 297) totaling 1,122 respondents. This study models four key principles of PCC: service providers respecting health-care customers’ values, needs and preferences; collaborative resources of the multi-disciplinary care team; health-care customers actively collaborating with their own resources; and health-care customers involving family and friends, explicating which principles of PCC have positive effects on outcomes: subjective well-being and service satisfaction.

Findings confirm that health-care customers want to feel respected by service providers, use their own resources to actively collaborate in their care and have multi-disciplinary teams coordinating and integrating their care. However, contrary to prior findings, for online primary care, service providers respecting customers’ values needs and preferences do not translate into health-care customers actively collaborating with their own resources. Further, involving family and friends has mixed results for online primary care. In that setting, this study finds that involving family and friends only positively impacts service satisfaction, when care is provided using video and not voice only.

By identifying which PCC principles influence the health-care customer experience most, this research shows policymakers where they should invest resources to achieve beneficial outcomes for health-care customers, service providers and society, thus advancing current thinking and practice.

This research provides a health-care customer perspective on PCC and shows how the resources of the health-care system can activate the health-care customer’s own resources. It further shows the role of technology in online care, where it alters how care is experienced by the health-care customer.

The Euro-centric nature of dark tourism research is limiting the perspective and restricting the scope of contemporary theory. Hence, this paper aims to explore how dark tourism consumption differs in a society apart from the Anglo/Eurosphere. This is done by testing Stone and Sharpley’s (2008) thanatological framework in Mexico, a country whose residents are renown for having a unique perspective on death, to assess whether Mexican dark tourism consumers undergo a similar, or different, thanatological experience to that proposed in the framework.

The study adopts a qualitative approach in the form of a case study. The opinions of Mexican dark tourism consumers were gained by using the technique of semi-structured interviewing in four separate dark tourism sites within Mexico City, with coding serving as the form of analysis.

The findings show that due to the non-existence of an absent/present death paradox in Mexican society, the research participants experienced a thanatological process that contrasts with those from Western societies, which indicates that the thanatological framework is unsuitable in the context of Mexican dark tourism. At the same time, the study contests the common perception that Mexicans have a jovial familiarity with death, and demonstrates that in this case the thanatological process confirmed an acceptance of death, rather than any kind of intimacy.

The research is valuable in that it is a response to recent calls for research in geographical locations not previously considered in a dark tourism/thanatology context.