A health tourism fair is one of the few places where you can meet travel agencies, tour operators, international patient facilitators and hotel managers face to face within four days. The stand, travel and staff costs pay off not when the fair ends, but when the meetings you collected turn into agreements. This guide puts the preparation, stand and follow-up steps for exhibiting hospitals, clinics and facilitators into a single checklist.
The list is not tied to one event. It works the same way at fairs that bring tourism and health tourism under one roof, such as ETHEXPO Eurasia Tourism and Health Expo at the Istanbul Expo Center on 25–28 November 2026, and at medical tourism congresses abroad. Upcoming events, with sources and as CSV and calendar files, are on our Medical Tourism Events Calendar.
4–6 weeks before: goals and meetings
The only way to measure a fair is to write down what you want before you go. “Awareness” cannot be measured when the fair ends; “meet 15 facilitators active in the UK and German markets and send a partner offer to 5 of them” can.
- Pick the partner type. A travel agency, a tour operator, an international patient facilitator and a hotel are not persuaded by the same offer. Prepare a one-sentence value proposition for each.
- Narrow the market. Choose the two or three countries you send, or want to send, patients from. Brochure, landing page and presentation language follow from that choice.
- Book meetings in advance. Review the fair’s exhibitor and visitor profile and offer target companies a stand time with a short, personal message before the event. Walk-ins are a bonus; the real meetings are planned.
- Have the legal basis ready. Partners working with Turkey ask early about the health tourism authorisation certificate held by hospitals, clinics and facilitators. Put the certificate number and scope in your partner deck.
2 weeks before: digital set-up
Every brochure, business card and QR code handed out at the fair points somewhere. If that place is not ready, the conversation stays in the exhibition hall.
- A landing page for partners. Show a page built for business partners, not your patient page: which treatments, coordination in which languages, transfer and accommodation scope, the partnership process and contacts. Publish a version in each target-market language.
- UTM-tagged QR codes. Create separate QR codes for the brochure, business card and stand panel, so fair traffic can be separated from other visits in your analytics.
- One place to record leads. If meeting notes end up spread across a stack of cards, phones and notebooks, there is no follow-up. Have the whole stand team write into the same form or CRM record.
- A WhatsApp line. Many international partners expect the first follow-up on WhatsApp. Use a company line instead of personal numbers; we compare the options in WhatsApp Business app vs API.
- Keep your Google reviews current. A partner you met will look you up after the fair. In our study of 9,297 Google reviews, 48.8% of reviews with a known language were not in Turkish, and whether you reply to them is visible too.
Example UTM structure
| Material | utm_source | utm_medium | utm_campaign |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brochure QR | fair-name-2026 | brochure | partner-programme |
| Business card QR | fair-name-2026 | business-card | partner-programme |
| Stand panel | fair-name-2026 | stand | partner-programme |
| Post-fair email | fair-name-2026 | follow-up |
During the fair: record every meeting
After the second day, faces and conversations blur. A two-minute note right after each meeting decides the quality of the follow-up you send weeks later.
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Company, person and role | Shows whether follow-up reaches a decision maker. |
| Partner type and market | Decides which offer template to send. |
| Treatments of interest | Ties the follow-up to a concrete topic instead of a general pitch. |
| Temperature: A / B / C | A: asked for an offer. B: interested, asked for information. C: introduced. Follow-up order follows this. |
| Next step and date | Records a clear promise such as “offer within 48 hours”. |
| Contact permission | Records the channel, the purpose and the person’s consent. |
- Treat contact data carefully. Details collected from business cards and badge scans are personal data under Turkey’s KVKK and, for EU contacts, the GDPR. Show a visible privacy notice at the stand. Handing over a card is not consent to bulk commercial messages; check your consent obligations with legal counsel before any mass send.
- Apply promotion rules at the stand too. Promotion by healthcare providers is restricted in Turkey and in many source markets. Check the regulations and your legal team before using outcome promises, before-and-after images or patient footage in brochures, videos or social posts.
- Produce content at the fair. Short videos from the stand team, panel notes and photos from partner meetings (with permission) build a content stock for the weeks after the fair. Spread them over a calendar instead of posting everything on the same day.
After the fair: 48 hours, 2 weeks, 90 days
This is where most of the fair investment is lost. If follow-up is late, the partner you met has also met dozens of other providers that week.
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| First 48 hours | A personal message to group A: the topic discussed, the document or offer promised, a clear next step. Not a newsletter. |
| First week | The requested information and partner page link to group B. A short introduction note to group C. |
| Week 2 | One reminder to A and B contacts who have not replied. An online meeting proposal for those at offer stage. |
| Month 1 | Publish the content produced at the fair; check partner page and QR traffic. |
| Day 90 | Review: meetings, offers, agreements and patient referrals. Decide on the next fair from this table. |
The success metric is not stand visitors but fair-sourced agreements and referred patients. Mark the source of every CRM record as “fair name and year”, and match it to the same name in your UTM data.
One-page checklist
- ☐ Fair goal written as numbers (meetings, offers, agreements).
- ☐ Target partner types and 2–3 markets chosen.
- ☐ Pre-booked meetings in the calendar.
- ☐ Authorisation certificate details and partner deck ready.
- ☐ Partner landing page live in the target languages.
- ☐ Separate UTM-tagged QR codes for brochure, card and stand.
- ☐ Stand team knows the single record form / CRM fields.
- ☐ Company WhatsApp line and response owner assigned.
- ☐ Visible privacy notice at the stand; bulk-message consent checked.
- ☐ Brochures and visuals checked against promotion rules.
- ☐ Personal follow-up sent to group A within 48 hours.
- ☐ Day-90 review in the calendar.
Building the post-fair system together
Turning partner and patient demand from a fair into a measurable flow takes landing pages, follow-up, advertising and reporting built together. We describe how we do this on our health tourism marketing and international patient marketing pages.
