Medical tourism communication of a Thai private hospital website

The growth of medical tourism has led to a change in the customer base from local to international, presenting a challenge in how to communicate with these potential new patients. In this paper we use the tools of social semiotics and corpus linguistics to analyze two versions of a Thai private hospital website, one from 1998 before the growth of medical tourism and one from 2010 when roughly half of all patients at the hospital were international. The findings show that, although some differences can be attributed to developments in website capabilities, the 2010 website uses several strategies to build social relationships, involve the audience and engender trust with the goal of establishing the hospital’s credibility for an international audience.