Sudipta Dev – Mumbai
Apollo White Dental recently launched a Holi-Dent package for attracting inbound dental tourism segment. The company that has the largest chain of dental clinics in India has launched this package to enable travellers to continue treatment from any of its centres as they travel across the country. “The entire concept of Holi-Dent comes from the fact that we know for sure there are two categories of people who travel to India for dental treatment – firstly the NRI population who normally come to India during their vacation; the second category comprises of people coming from Middle East, Africa and South East Asian countries who have high regard for medical processes in India,” said VS Venkatesh, CEO, Apollo White Dental. For the second category the company has tied up with a number of medical value travel agents and medical facilitators. “By virtue of social media also we are also reaching out to larger population not just limited to these countries,” he added.
Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi are emerging as serious dental tourism destinations in the country, informed Venkatesh, adding further. “Goa has emerged as a dental tourism market, by default than by design as planeloads of tourists land there and stay there for extended period of two to four months.”
The company was the first to launch the dental spa concept in India. It has seven dental spas in the country including in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. “These provide patients with top of the line international facilities, the best equipments, internationally trained doctors, etc,” said Venkatesh.
Pointing out that the cost of treatment in international markets for dental treatment is very high, and a large number of procedures are not covered by the insurance, Venkatesh stated, “Dental tourism market in India is witnessing a marked growth. Now with the introduction of visa on arrival, the market is bound to grow substantially. Today, the leading dental tourism destinations in this part of the world are Singapore and Thailand. While those countries offer good services, India is a much bigger country so a large number of people will come here.” He believes the government should promote India as a destination in target markets, and then have a bilateral union of medical facilitators and service providers so that they can showcase India’s facilities in those markets.