Travel agency promotes surgery and scenery

Press, 21 May 1987, Page 32

Travel agency promotes surgery and scenery

By

TIM DONOGHUE

NZPA Staff correspondent Taipei

Surgery and scenery are being offered to prospective Asian tourists as part of a “hospital-ity” package by an Auckland travel agent. The managing director of Jade Travel, Ltd, Mr Jimmy Wong, is in Taipei marketing- the scenery-with-surgery idea. In an interview with NZPA Mr Wong, whose company caters for approximately 6000 Asian visitors to New Zealand each year, said New Zealand had an exceptionally high standard of medical and dental treatment. The promotional material he has distributed to the travel agents in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the last week contains a photograph of an operation in process in a New Zealand hospital. Mr Wong said a triple grafting bypass

operation cost between $40,000 and $BO,OOO in the United States. However an Asian visitor could have the same operation in a private hospital in New Zealand for less than $20,000. A breast augmentation in New Zealand costs about $4OOO. In the United States the cost was about $5OOO for the surgery alone. “To this must be added the considerable cost of the hospital and the anaesthetic,” Mr Wong said. New Zealand had to get the message across to tourists that they could have such operations in New Zealand, he said. “A lot of Asians go to Japan for plastic surgery. But what they do not realise is that New Zealand is good at it too.”

He said a major plastic surgery operation in New Zealand (facelift, neck and eyelids) cost about $5OOO.

“In the United States the surgeon’s fee alone is SUSSOOO ($8750).” Mr Wong’s promotional material suggested that prospective clients should contact his agency in Auckland. Once preliminary contact had been made his agency would arrange for an expert in the required field to make the necessary subsequent arrangements. Mr Wong said he had had some difficulty selling the idea to medical authorities in Hong Kong during a visit last August. His company was working with an Auckland company called New Zealand Medical Services International. Mr Wong said the company was formed in 1985 to make both treatment and a recuperative holiday available to foreigners at a cost that would barely meet the price of medical treatment in their home coun-