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The main purpose of this paper is to outline the antecedents of patient satisfaction in the field of medical tourism (MT) applying extant literature and to develop a conceptual model based on the review.

This paper presents a thorough review of prior studies related to the antecedents of patient satisfaction in the MT sector. Moreover, it provides the theoretical base that helped the researcher to identify significant relationship between the patient satisfaction and its antecedents.

The researchers identified the prominent antecedents of patient satisfaction and present the potential interrelationships between different antecedents of patient satisfaction such as treatment quality, cost attractiveness, destination image and service quality with patient satisfaction based on the review.

The results have momentous practical implications as they will help researchers to better understand the antecedents of patient satisfaction and their potential inter linkages with patient satisfaction in MT sector. The conceptual model derived from the review may guide the actions of researchers as well as practitioners in the MT industry as a whole. The present study provides insights for further research in the MT sector and thereby helps to further enrich the existing theoretical base of the MT.

The study brings together the scattered knowledge from the broad and extensive range of medical or health tourism and cognate literature which indicate ideological differences among various aspects of MT as well as potential factors determining patient satisfaction in MT sector (antecedents of satisfaction). The newly developed model incorporates a new construct called “treatment quality” as different from “service quality,” which is a widely used construct to explain customer satisfaction. The antecedents of patient satisfaction and their inter-linkages with patient satisfaction provide a sound theoretical foundation for the future studies.

This study evaluates the knowledge structure of medical tourism within the geographical context of South East Asia. This region is one of the growing economic powerhouses in the world, and tourism activities have contributed a lot to its advancement.

Applying a science mapping technique using bibliometric analysis, the current and emerging themes and future trends are analyzed using bibliographic coupling and co-word analysis.

Findings show that current trends produced four themes: Fundamentals of medical tourism in Southeast Asia, determinants of tourist medical tourism visits, quality of medical and health service in Southeast Asia and impact of medical tourism on national economic growth. The future trends also produced four themes related to navigating excellence in medical tourism, medical tourism and economic growth, service quality in medical tourism services and accredited destinations in the globalized era of medical tourism.

This study is relevant to all stakeholders, operators and local communities in Southeast Asia tourism destinations to provide the best medical tourism with the best quality service and technologies.

This study fills the gap by performing a bibliometric approach to reviewing medical tourism in Southeast Asia using a science mapping technique. Crucial themes are produced through topological and temporal streams that provide critical insight for future developments in medical tourism in the region.

The purpose of this study is to present the state-of-the-art scientific research in the intersection between smart tourism and social networks to better understand the role of the latter (such as Facebook and Twitter) in the development of the smart paradigm in tourism, e.g. how the relationship between smart tourism and social networks has been observed by authors, or the techniques and analytical tools that are most broadly used to take advantage of available data in social networks to feed a smart logic in the management of tourism companies and destinations.

A systematic search in scientific databases (such as Web of Science and Scopus) was performed, with December 2018 as a closing date. Once duplications were eliminated and the adequacy the outputs obtained verified properly, a total of 61 documents were considered for this study, most of which were journal articles.

The characterization of research in this area with both a bibliometric and bibliographic analysis.

The presentation of a detailed picture on the content of the research carried out in the abovementioned intersections: evolution over time; most prolific authors, institutions and countries; journals, conferences and publishers that have paid more attention to this topic; type of research performed, objects of study, methodologies used and main contributions.

The proposal of a research agenda in the field under study. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no a similar work carried out in this field.