Abstract

Travel medicine has emerged as a new field of medicine that involves pre-travel evaluation, contingency planning during travel, and post-travel care. Its implementation showed major discrepancies among different countries. This study aims to assess the health information given to travelers and detect their sources of information. This is a cross sectional analytical observational study of 397 travelers implemented on different travel destinations all over Egypt. It adopts self-administered structured questionnaires according to the International Travel Health Questionnaire (ITHQ) and in-depth interviews with managers in the Ministry of Tourism. The results showed that 17.5% of the international travelers and none of the national travelers heard about the ITHQ; whereas, 58.9% of the international travelers and 26.8% of the national travelers took information about safety measures from different sources. However, there was a lack of travelers’ knowledge about safety measures with no obvious role of travel agencies.

Key words: Travel medicine, traveler safety, travel agent health advice.