Turkish clinics race to woo Brits amid booming health tourism

From perfecting dazzling smiles to restoring full heads of hair or undergoing major surgeries, an increasing number of Brits are traveling to Turkey for affordable medical and cosmetic treatments – and clinics are going out of their way to win their custom.

Around 100 Turkish clinics set up stalls at the foot of Westminster Abbey last month for the London International Health Tourism Expo trade fair, where businesses displayed banners touting triumphant hair transplants, IVF treatments and discount dentistry.

British newspapers regularly carry horror stories about botched operations, but that has done little to dissuade the hundreds of thousands of U.K. medical tourists who travel abroad for treatment each year.

Nevertheless, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the number of British people who received medical treatment abroad almost doubled between 2021 and 2023, rising from 234,000 to 431,000.

Backlogs and botched surgeries

Faced with backlogs in the NHS public health service, many refuse to spend months and even years on waiting lists or switch to the expensive private system.

And in the last two years, almost one in five Britons who have been unable to get an appointment at the dentist have decided to go abroad, according to an Ipsos poll for the PA news agency.

British influencers and reality TV celebrities have extensively documented their cosmetic procedures, advertising clinics to their millions of followers online.

But Jonathan Edelheit, head of the U.S.-based Medical Tourism Association, said some patients make "poor choices" by seeking out "the lowest cost provider and trusting anyone online," and urged people to opt for accredited facilities.

To boost confidence, Turkey introduced a system of compulsory certification in 2017 for its roughly 4,000 facilities treating foreign patients, who numbered around 2 million in 2024.

"We take health very seriously, and we believe one-to-one conversations create less room for errors," said Ilayda Seçer, deputy general manager of the trade fair in London.

Since 2023, the Turkish group ALZ International has organized a dozen similar events in Berlin, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Baku and Moscow, drawing thousands of visitors.