Who pays medical-travel websites — and who pays us
Almost no medical-travel website is funded by patients alone — most are funded, directly or indirectly, by the hospitals and clinics they write about. That’s not automatically a problem, but it changes what a recommendation is worth, and it’s rarely disclosed. Here are the three common models, and the one this site is built to use instead.
Three funding models in this category
A facilitator is paid a percentage of the treatment price for each patient it sends to a particular hospital — commonly cited in industry literature as somewhere in the range of 7.5% to 30% of the package price, usually built into the price the patient is quoted rather than charged separately. The structural risk this creates is well documented: academic and industry-body analysis of the sector has flagged that a facilitator paid more by one provider has a built-in financial incentive to steer patients there, regardless of which provider is actually the best fit for that patient’s case.
A comparison site or directory ranks or features hospitals and clinics based partly or entirely on advertising spend — a paid listing, sponsored placement, or pay-per-lead fee — rather than on any independent assessment of quality. The site may look neutral, but its ordering reflects a marketing budget as much as, or more than, it reflects the provider’s fit for any given patient.
Some patient-facing sites are simply a hospital’s or hospital group’s own marketing operation, sometimes under a name that doesn’t make the ownership obvious. In this model, every comparison the site offers is a comparison of its own services against themselves — there is no independent second opinion involved in the site’s content by design.
None of these models is inherently fraudulent, and each is common enough in this category that industry and academic sources have studied them directly — see the sources below. The point isn’t that any one model is illegitimate; it’s that how a site is paid changes what its recommendations are worth, and that’s worth knowing before you trust one.
This site’s own model — stated as policy, not yet as fact
OncologyIstanbul has not signed any partner-hospital contracts yet. The policy every future partnership will be required to accept is: hospitals will pay a fixed fee per case, the same fee from every partner hospital, so there is no financial reason to steer any patient toward one provider over another. Partner contracts will also carry a price-parity clause — forbidding a higher price being quoted through this service than a patient could get by booking directly. Patients will pay hospitals directly, itemized; this service is not designed to hold patient funds at any point.
This is a policy commitment describing what every partnership will be required to accept — not a claim that contracts already exist. See how we plan to be paid for the full policy, and the editorial policy for how the rest of this site is sourced and dated.