Sita Enters Healthcare Tourism Segment

Anindita Chattopadhyay New Delhi

In what may be seen as an attempt to tap the healthcare tourism segment in its nascent stage, the inbound division of Sita World Travel has launched SITACARE - a dedicated strategic business unit that will focus exclusively on healthcare tourism. SITA has tied up with VedicIndia, a Mumbai-based NRI health management tourism company, who have compiled a healthcare tourism project after three years of intense research. Claiming it to be the first structured promotion of healthcare tourism, Himmat Anand, chief operating officer, SITA Inbound Division, said, “The joint promotion is between Sitacare, VedicIndia and Apollo Hospitals, though Wockhardt and others are there in the consortium. It is a collaboration venture and no financial investment is involved.”

Himmat Anand

According to him, the time is ripe enough to move beyond Ayurveda and other alternate medicine to high-level, specialised medical treatment as the size of the medical tourism industry stands between Rs 1,200 crore to Rs 1,500 crore and is growing at a rate of 30 per cent annually. As he puts it, “India has tremendous potential to capture a major part of the international healthcare treatment because our country offers easily accessible healthcare services that are at par with international standards. India offers medical specialisation in every conceivable discipline like transplantation of vital organs, cancer treatment, neurosurgery, cardiac surgery etc, along with state-of-the-art facilities. These facilities coupled with extremely low treatment costs as compared to the West, makes health tourism an ideal proposition.”

Anand’s point can be endorsed by facts. For instance, heart surgery costs approximately USD 20,000 abroad whereas in India it is around USD 5,000; while knee joint replacement costs USD 16,000 as compared to USD 4,500 in India.

The main demand for this segment, noted Anand, will come from the 20 million NRIs living across the world. “To start with we will use the 150,000 NRI database of VedicIndia and utilise resources of our associate division like SOTC. We also plan to target nationals from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mauritius, Middle-East, Africa and CIS countries.” While the medical appointments and healthcare arrangements will be handled by Vedicindia through their established contacts, Sitacare will take care of support services, such as arrival, departure, accommodation, travelling around, arrangements with spas and more.

Anand is confident of handling 6,000 people in the first year of operations. Talking about the marketing strategy, he revealed, "We have enough networking resources to launch this project, so we won't go for ad promotions now. We will market the product and facilities available in India through our overseas agents. We are negotiating with National Health Services, the government medical system of UK, so that some of their waiting list patients could be referred to India. They have about one million patients in queue for specialised medical treatment with waiting time varying between 3-6 months. Since healthcare tourism now enjoys government support and is being promoted by ministry of tourism as part of promoting brand India, that will give us also mileage.” The key-operating base of Sitacare will be in Mumbai with support offices in Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bangalore.