The study is motivated by the need to develop a health tourism destination in the region of Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Due to deplorable healthcare sector, Nigeria serves as a rich source of health tourists to the international community, resulting in huge drain of the nation’s resources. The study aims at investigating the extent of marketing opportunities associated with health tourism in the sub-region and explores the forces impeding Nigeria’s transformation into a health tourism destination country. A survey method is used. The target population is 30,642 comprising Health tourists, Medical Consultants, Marketing Practitioners and the sample size is 395. One hypothesis and two research questions guided the study. Primary and secondary sources of data are accessed. The questionnaire is validated by expert opinions and adopts the five-point Likert Scale format. The reliability coefficient of the research instrument, 0.975 is estimated from the pilot study. With one-way ANOVA and Minitab software techniques, the hypothesis of the study is tested at 0.05 level of significance and 23 degrees of freedom. The study reveals significant marketing opportunities of health tourism destination in ECOWAS region with effect size of 82.68 percent and queried political system, social system, corruption and weak public institutions as forces impeding Nigeria’s transformation into a health tourism destination country. It is recommended that Nigeria entrenches strong political system, overhauls social system, doggedly fights corruption and strengthens foundations of her public institutions while upgrading medical infrastructures, healthcare services, public utilities and security architectures to international standards to become a health tourism destination country in West African sub-region and beyond.
