DATE: Friday, July 12, 2002
Section: LIFE D-1
Column: Travel
Author: Kitty Bean Yancey

Take a ‘hair restoration vacation’

How’s this for a hair-raising getaway? Alan Bauman, a doctor in Baca Raton, Fla., has begun offering “Hair Restoration Vacations,” for those who want to go home with a less shiny pate.

Packages starting at $4500 include lodging and hair transplant techniques such as “micrografting” single, living hair follicles from the sides and back of the scalp to balding areas. Bauman’s staff will arrange a stay at luxe hotels, even transportation via limo and private jet.

Bauman got the idea of packaging when “patients started coming down and asking about accommodations. They are busy people- self-made, professionals, CEO’s,” he says. Other hair-restoring physicians also have begun to help patients with travel arrangements.

The key to offering quick service to time-pressed people is via pretreatment “virtual consultations,” says Bauman, whose Web site is www.hairrestorationvacation.com. “They e-mail me photos of themselves, and I give them a rough idea of what can be done. I make ‘mouse calls.’

<<Hair Today: A patient of Alan Bauman before
and after two sessions of 1700 micrografts.>>