Three young Armenian entrepreneurs are promoting dental tourism to Armenia, as they see potential. The three young entrepreneurs Gor Hovakimyan, Artur Gasparyan, and Ashot Khourdgaryan, are seeking financial backing in Russia to expand the initiative, as the start up cash they have is very limited.
A small handful of businesses in Armenia have websites advertise that claim they provide dental tourism services. But in practice most are local clinics with daily walk-in clients, and may not have any international business at all. One or two clinics do advertise internationally. Dental Tourism Armenia is a clinic in Yerevan that has an English website.
The new business is Dental Travel Armenia. It seeks to promote dental tourism to Armenia by working with dental tourism agencies in Europe to direct some of their business to Armenia.
Dental Travel Armenia already has a website in English where potential customers can talk to dentists in Armenia, get information regarding the types of dental treatment available, and see what various procedures will cost.
The website allows customers to rate their dentists in terms of quality of service, allowing new clients to choose a dentist according to their rating.
Gor Hovakimyan explains, “We don’t have a dental clinic to promote. We collaborate with everyone. Quality is our standard. We work with ten clinics in Armenia that we researched in detail, interviewing the dentists.”
The target markets are customers in Germany, UK, France, Italy, USA and Canada. Overseas customers are collected and returned to the airport and receive a dental cleaning, both for free.
The biggest problem for Armenia is that it is further away than competitors, with much longer flight times.