More and more affluent Chinese travel all the way to Switzerland for medical and aesthetic treatments for quality as well as privacy reasons

Medical tourism is one of the fastest growing fields in the travel and tourism industry. With a growing ageing and financially strong consumer demographic happy to spend its money on health, traveling abroad for medical reasons, in combination with a holiday, is a fast-growing and highly lucrative business.

With the rapidly growing middle as well as upper class, more and more wealthy Chinese head cross-border for higher quality care. Other than pursuing a better standard of living, their biggest concern is health. While affluent Chinese used to travel to the US, Taiwan or Singapore for medical care, they now prefer Switzerland (if they can afford it). Chinese travelers are the quickest-growing traveler segment within Swiss tourism. In comparison to last year, a growth of 97% could be recorded. Due to discretion reasons, it is not possible to identify how many of these travelers visited Switzerland for medical reasons. However, both Swiss clinics and private doctors have noticed an increase in Chinese patients as the demand for Chinese medical translators has increased rapidly. (Chinese) VIPs from movie stars and CEOs to governmental officials love the privacy in Switzerland where they can recover from their treatments "in peace".

Switzerland, with its mountain resorts and its spa tradition, has an established reputation for medical tourism which is forecast to grow by 20% in constant value terms over the next few years. A study produced by the independent research body Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI) in Zurich has shown that 30,000 people visit Switzerland every year for health reasons, spending in excess of CHF 1 billion on treatments including family expenditures. VIPs prefer Switzerland over other medical tourism destinations because they can count on privacy, discretion, impeccable service, outstanding facilities, cutting edge technology as well as perfectly-trained staff.