Network of environmental themes Affecting Strategic Alliance Formation (Study Case: Iranian Medical Tourism)

Different tourism industry features like fragility, highlighted SMEs involvement and vast dependent industries make strategic alliance formation as one of the most important strategies in tourism. Meanwhile, the formation of such alliances in some tourism branches like medical tourism is more important because of two fields are engaged here; Tourism and medical. Meantime, it seems that up to now, there has not been any research in Iran about the dimensions and components that affect the formation of strategic alliances between medical tourism businesses. Hence, the present study sought to identify environmental dimensions and factors affecting medical tourism alliances formation in the country. To this end, 17 medical tourism experts have been recognized by snowball sampling. Data have been gathered through semi-structured interviews and analyzed with Maxqda10software based on theme analysis. Findings show that 6 main themes including legal, cultural, economic, technological, communicational, political elements as well as patient-absorption channels can effect on medical tourism alliance formation in Iran.