Travel Health Experience in High Altitude Destination

Travelling to remote regions at high altitude in less developed countries is fast growing in popularity amongst adventure tourists. In the course of this travel tourists are exposed to many endemic diseases of the region and the potentially deadly symptoms of mountain sickness.This work examines travel health experience among tourists in high altitude destinations through case studies of Sagarmatha National Park, Nepal and Tibet, China. Nine out of ten suffer some forms of health ailments, of which the most common are mountain sickness symptoms, diarrhoea, respiratory symptoms and musculoskeletal pain. Travel motivation, pre-travel preparation and tourist profiles do influence travel health experience in the high altitude environment. The author explains that the manifold and close interconnections displayed in the health travel experience model are strongly indicative of the desirability of a holistic approach to both health tourism research and health management in high altitude destinations. The analysis incorporates the two important disciplines of tourism and medicine, and should be useful to tourism managers, medical personnel, researchers,students and academicians.