Medical, health and wellness tourism and travel represent a dynamic and rapidly growing multi-disciplinary economic activity and field of knowledge. This research responds to earlier calls to integrate research on travel medicine and tourism. It critically reviews the literature published on these topics over a 50-year period (1970 to 2020) using CiteSpace software. Some 802 articles were gathered and analyzed from major databases including the Web of Science and Scopus. Markets (demand and behavior), destinations (development and promotion), and development environments (policies and impacts) emerged as the main three research themes in medical-health-wellness tourism. Medical-health-wellness tourism will integrate with other care sectors and become more embedded in policy-making related to sustainable development, especially with regards to quality of life initiatives. A future research agenda for medical-health-tourism is discussed.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to systematically analyze the evolution of health tourism development, identify relevant themes and segments of health tourism research and offer future research directions and practical implications for academic researchers and tourism practitioners worldwide using China as an example. Design/methodology/approach Using a bibliometric analysis, the present study comprehensively analyzes the theme, segments and the evolution of health tourism research over the past 40 years in China. Findings Major findings show that health tourism research in China could be divided into four stages with different characteristics, and three segments, including wellness tourism, health and wellness tourism and medical tourism. Findings also reveal the trend of health tourism development tends to be industrialized, diversified and systematic under the guidance of recent policies. Theoretically, based on the theoretical framework developed by Hall (2011), the present study contributes to the establishment and extension of the framework for health tourism within the context of China. Practically, findings can provide health tourism-related policy implications for the future development of health or health sector-integrated tourism. Research limitations/implications The study proposes possible collaboration between government and academia in terms of health tourism-related policy formulation. Originality/value Through 40-year bibliometric analysis of health tourism evolution in China, the present study explores the main themes of health tourism development, identifies the segments of health tourism and analyzes the development stages of health tourism. Findings should be of use to international readers to better understand the uniqueness of health tourism development and find out possible future health tourism development research directions. As a result, major contributions of this paper are the comprehensive analysis of the evolution of health tourism research and the implications on other countries and regions to adopt a pragmatic approach to explore the trend and unique characteristics of health tourism for future development.

To systematically understand the evolution of health tourism in China, the present study visually analyzes the theme evolution and frontiers of Chinese health tourism research on the basis of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database through bibliometric analysis. The findings reflect the existence of diverse clustering themes in health tourism research, and the formation time of each theme is different. The findings also indicate that the change in the theme is led by government policy. Theoretically, the findings of the present study can, on the one hand, contribute to the health tourism literature by comprehensively exploring and summarizing the themes and topics of health tourism development in China since its appearance (i.e., 1981), and, on the other hand, provide references for future health tourism exploration directions. Findings of the present study can provide references for effective future development directions of the health tourism industry.

Health tourism products have become the object of tourists' pursuit, and health tourism has become an important project for the development of domestic tourist attractions. Health tourism has the basic projects of traditional tourism. On this basis, it has added many concepts of traditional health culture and formed a new type of tourism that integrates various functions such as recuperation, leisure, health care and vacation. On the basis of expounding the relevant theories of health tourism culture, this paper discusses the connotation of traditional health culture from the perspectives of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, and analyzes the characteristics and classification of Chinese health tourism. The product mapping of traditional health culture in modern health-preserving scenic areas is deeply analyzed with three scenic spots of Wudang Mountain, Shennongjia and Dalaoling, on this basis, to explore the development strategies of traditional health culture and modern tourism development in China.

Background: China has been recently considered as an essential component of the world health tourism market. Nevertheless, limited studies, if any, have focused on marketing China’s health tourism.Methods: Through the stratification sampling survey method, the present study collected 351 valid questionnaires.Results: The present study identified possible attributes and resources to market health destinations in China; and all the identified attributes were classified into four factors: basic services, health services, religious services, and social services.Conclusions: Safety was considered to be the top attribute of health destinations; and the most effective way to do marketing of health tourism in China is through events. Furthermore, travel pattern of health tourism is also identified.

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The travel notes contain a wealth of tourists' behavior information, which provides a new way to study tourists' preferences. How to mine the text of online travel notes accurately and efficiently has become the key to research tourists' preferences. In this paper, the theory and technology of text mining were introduced into the research of tourists' preference through a large number of online travel notes accumulated on the Internet. The main research work of this paper was as follows: (1) The tourists' preference model was constructed by complex network method; (2) The travel notes data of Sanya tourists as an example was crawled and analyzed. In this paper, the theory of network travel data and text mining is introduced into the study of tourists' preferences, which not only improves the data quality of traditional preference research field, but also provides a new method for mastering tourists' preferences more accurately.

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