In the five years since COVID, 65 million people from Europe, the UK, the Middle East and the US researched getting dental treatment in Turkey. They clicked the ads. They filled out the forms. They watched the before-and-after videos. They compared prices. They did the math. They wanted it. They really wanted it.
1.5 million actually came. The remaining 63.5 million people either drifted off, gave up, or were called a couple of times and then forgotten as "not interested."
This isn't a marketing problem. It's a patience problem. And that is exactly why Volina exists.
The Beginning
What bothered me wasn't the cost of dental care in the West. Everyone already knows that story. What bothered me was this: the demand was clearly there; tens of millions of people had done their research and made up their minds. And clinics were letting that demand rot in their CRMs. Somewhere as a WhatsApp message, an unanswered email, or a row once exported to Excel and forgotten.
I started talking to clinic owners. The picture was always the same.
And when did you last follow up?
"We try to call, but they don't always pick up."
How many times do you call?
"A couple of times."
And then what happens? Silence.
We're talking about clinics spending $5,000–30,000 a month on Google and Meta ads, collecting real interest from real people, then dropping everything after a few calls. Average patient value: €5,000. The math is brutal. That's why we founded Volina.
The Real Problem
Dental tourism isn't an impulse purchase. The research process can take up to 48 months. If someone is considering doing all of their teeth, they don't make that decision today. They think for two years, compare three different countries, read hundreds of reviews on social media, maybe talk it over with family, and then, when they're ready, they message a clinic.
Clinics take this patient, call four or five times, and delete them from the list because they didn't answer. But this patient didn't leave. They're just not ready yet. While the decision process is still ongoing, their connection to the clinic breaks. Another country, another clinic appears in their mind. And that initial intent, won with thousands of dollars in ad spend, goes to waste.
Volina calls these patients back. Not just once. At the right time, in the right language, with the right message. Whatever stage the patient is at, Volina is there.
What We Built
Volina deploys AI voice agents onto the lead lists clinics already own. Not a chatbot. Not an email sequence. Real phone calls, in the patient's own language, that gauge intent, handle objections, give information, and book the appointment at the right moment.
To date we've made over 50,000 calls. We've connected more than 2,000 patients to sales. We pull qualified patient appointments out of leads that had sat untouched for months, even years.
Put another way, at the big-picture level: apply that same rate to 63.5 million unconverted prospective patients and you get 2.2 million reactivatable patients. Even at an average patient value of €5,000, that's €11 billion in recoverable revenue. Money currently sleeping in Excel spreadsheets.
We recorded and analysed 50,000 calls. We know why people pick up. We know why they stay on the line. We know exactly where the moment is between a patient saying "yes, I'd like to book an appointment" and "in that case, let me look at Hungary too."
Where We're Headed
Every call we record is training data. Each conversation teaches us more about the patient psychology, language patterns, objection types and decision triggers unique to this market. Which sentence keeps a patient on the line, which question makes them think, which moment makes them hang up. We know these because we've lived them thousands of times.
In dental tourism, the decision process can stretch up to 48 months. Over that time the patient touches dozens of different clinics, dozens of different countries. The winner isn't the one with the best ad budget. The winner is the one who's there at the right moment, with the right message, within those 48 months.
That's exactly what we're learning. And this data is something no general-purpose tool that has never spoken in this market could replicate. We're in this room. We intend to own it.
The Big Claim
Medical tourism is a €15 billion global industry. Turkey alone generates over €2 billion in health tourism revenue a year, and dental is one of the dominant verticals. The clinics generating that revenue work in the future on the clinical side, but in the stone age on the patient follow-up side.
63.5 million people are still out there. Some filled out a form at a clinic, got a few calls and were then forgotten. Some will be ready within two years but have already erased that clinic from their mind. Some will get a call from Volina.
We set out with more than 50,000 calls of data, proven results, a founding team that's been inside this problem from the start, and an unshakeable belief that dental tourism will reshape itself around whoever builds the best patient follow-up infrastructure.
That will be us.