a cluster · TurkeyAntalya

A Turkish Mediterranean city of 2,722,103 people in its metropolitan area, whose private clinics sit in the central Muratpaşa district and along the hotel strip at Lara, a short transfer from an airport that in 2020 carried more international passengers than Istanbul's two airports did. Antalya took more than 16.5 million foreign visitors in 2023. The health trade sells into that arrival machine: a resort room doubles as convalescence, and the invoice is frequently written by a licensed travel agency rather than by the hospital.

The agency on the invoice is not an accident of commerce; it is written into the law. The Turkish regulation of 13 July 2017 defines an international health tourism intermediary as a group A travel agency holding an operating certificate under Law 1618 of 14 September 1972, and requires both that agency and the treating facility to hold a Ministry authorisation certificate before either may trade with foreign patients. A country that ran a package-holiday industry first regulated surgery through it.

The state had been promoting the city for years before that. A 2012 catalogue published by the Antalya Promotion and Tourism Development company with BAKA, the West Mediterranean Development Agency, records that the Ministry of Health set up a Health Tourism Coordinating Unit in 2010, brought in promotion incentives in 2011, and ran an international patient assistance telephone line in English, German, Russian and Arabic. Its photographic credits name Dünya Göz Hospital, Aspendos Hospital and Akdeniz University Hospital.

That catalogue is a sales document, and it reads like one — it instructs a reader with a long queue at home and an expensive health system to buy a ticket. This directory carries it as evidence of what a development agency was selling in 2012, not as a description of care.

Inference — Antalya's pitch differs from Istanbul's in one structural way. Istanbul sells a procedure to somebody who came for the procedure. Antalya sells a procedure attached to a stay that already had a reason, which lengthens the convalescence on the ground and shortens nothing about the follow-up at home.

Trade practice — the Antalya package is quoted per person and covers the transfer, the hotel nights, the operation and a companion's bed. The clinic day sits inside a longer stay, so a dental course of two or three visits fits a fortnight and a hair transplant leaves a week of sun to avoid. Deposits hold the date. What falls outside the quote is what falls outside everywhere: imaging, laboratory work, a complication, a night past the package, and the flight change if the surgeon says wait.

As of 16 September 2026 the 2017 regulation is the operative instrument, and the two documents that matter for a facility here are its health facility licence and its international health tourism authorisation certificate. No inbound patient count for the city is carried on this record.

OpenStreetMap is queried 25 km around the city point, which reaches Konyaaltı in the west, Kepez in the north and the Lara hotel strip in the east.