Hello and welcome to the High-Yield Tourism podcast. I’m Gary Bowerman. On today’s show, Dr. Jens Traenhart and I will be discussing cultural fighting, martial arts, and high yield tourism.

So let’s get started. This is High-Yield Tourism. Hello and thanks for listening in.

On today’s show, Jens is with me again, and we’ll be examining how destinations, or some of them, are using cultural arts to create high-yield tourism experiences that shine a new light on a country’s values, history, and traditions. Jens, good to be back with you. This was your idea, cultural fighting. Tell us a bit more.

Thanks, Gary. And yeah, great to be back with you.

Yeah, so I mean, as you know, I’ve been working on this concept of passion tourism and micro niches for quite some time. And that’s obviously one way for a destination or for a travel company like a hotel or a DMC to build their high-yield tourism strategy, to attract people that obviously spend money and where the money stays in the destination and generates economic benefits. I was, as you know, recently in Japan. And while I was there, I saw this pamphlet about sumo wrestling. And when I looked at this pamphlet a little bit more carefully, I saw that it’s not just about watching a fight at the stadium in Osaka, but also having the opportunity to get immersed into the culture as well. So I thought, well, this is actually a micro niche and did a bit of research on that, visited the stadium and thought this could be a nice topic to kind of go deeper and use it as one example, how destinations that do have these strengths and assets can leverage that to build a passion tourism strategy and drive high yield tourism.

Yeah, it’s interesting. Like you, I’ve been to a sumo event before and it is an event, isn’t it? It’s a ceremony in many ways. Well, I mean, these guys are revered. They are almost like mythical figures in some way in the culture of Japan. And that is really imbued in the way the whole ceremony, the whole stadium is brought together before, during and after the actual combat themselves. But when we talk about cultural fighting, we don’t wanna scare people around the world. How would you define it beyond sumo? What do we mean?

Well, I think maybe you mentioned in the opening, I think martial arts might sound a little bit more civil than cultural fighting, because obviously we don’t wanna have cultures fighting with each other. So maybe we’ll stick with martial arts for now. But I think, as you mentioned, it is really a way to dig deeper into the culture of a country that is embedded in martial arts. So it’s obviously not just Japan. I live in Thailand when I’m not in Saudi Arabia and they have Muay Thai. And I’m sure we’re gonna discuss it a little bit more because that’s obviously embedded into soft power and the five Fs around Thainess. And again, that is a whole cultural experience as well. When you go to Ayutthaya and you see what’s happening there, it’s a ceremony. Taekwondo in Korea. And many years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Shaolin Temple in Henan province in China, which obviously is the famous Kung Fu fighting. And again, that’s also then embedded into culture. And what’s interesting about that is it’s not just really the combat in itself, but it’s also around what is martial art is actually teaching people, with discipline, with resilience, being a better person, having respect for one another.

So it’s very interesting how this actually is not just going into and watching a fight. And in the article that I guess we were publishing after this call, I tried to break it down into kind of like different pillars. So one being the people that go for a fight and watch that like I’ve done. Then you have the people that want to do fitness. I mean, in Thailand, you can go to these Muay Thai camps all over the country, and you can learn how to fight. And that’s more around the whole notion of fitness. And then you have people that obviously want to engage in the culture. There it’s not so much about fighting, but really immersing themselves. So at Shaolin Temple, you could be there for entire months for 2000 US dollars when you look at the website and you can really engage and immerse yourself in the whole culture of Shaolin Temple, the masters and Kung Fu.

So going back to the sumo experience, which kind of sparked the article that you’ve written and the idea for the podcast and how we’ve built some other themes around it. What was it about that sumo experience that kind of sparked something inside of you? Were there other tourists there? What was the kind of tourism experience around the actual combat?

It was promoted as a tourist experience. You know, as you know, Japan, everything is normally in Japan, but the brochure, the leaflet was in English. So that tells you very clearly that it is obviously geared towards tourists. And the various packages that you can buy from just basically watching the fight, but also you get traditional Japanese meals. You can meet the fighters backstage and you can even challenge a sumo wrestler. I chose not to do that. But again, I think they’re trying really to make an immersive experience. And then you can obviously also go into, let’s say a camp to learn how to do that and learn the whole rituals behind that.

Yeah, it’s interesting that you say that. I was looking on the Japan Sports Tourism website and Japan Sports Tourism promotes all sorts of different outdoor activities, snow sports, cycling, kayaking, and skateboarding. But it has a specific section of its website, which it calls Budo Tourism, B-U-D-O. And that’s where it looks at martial arts. So as you mentioned, sumo, but also judo, kendo, karate, Aikido, archery, and the art of swordsmanship. And as you said, it tries to bring these together as events that people want to watch and imbibe the experience, because these go back through history, through centuries. But then also how those can be tied to sightseeing, historical places, the culture, those experiences that just take you deeper into a place that enable you to connect much more with the place that you are, the community, the culture, the cuisine, all of those things. So Japan Sports Tourism is actually doing this, Jens. And I think that shows they have a very ready-made set of martial arts. They have packages, they have beautiful landscapes. The culture is very, very deep, and to many people, quite impenetrable when you visit Japan for the first or even the second time. So there’s a way to bring that together. But you mentioned Muay Thai in Thailand, and that can be a bit more participative, can’t it?

A lot of people go there to actually practise or to learn how to fight. Yes. So you have these camps in Samui, in Phuket, in Thailand, in Bangkok, in Chiang Mai, and so on, where you can kind of learn how to fight. But when you watch this, and I’ve been to a couple of these camps just to take maybe one or two classes and so on, just to kind of experience this, actually, the first thing you learn is not the fighting, but the whole rituals behind it. And that’s what makes it interesting, and that maybe what people don’t normally think about from a tourism standpoint, how it can drive high yield, because Thailand, with Muay Thai, it’s almost like a symbol. And this is why it’s part of the five Fs around soft power. It’s tied to heritage, it’s tied to music, ritual dances, this crew going into the community. And if you’ve been to the ceremony in Ayutthaya, I mean, you have people coming from all over the world participating in this ceremony. And then when you look at Korea with Taekwondo, it’s very similar, actually. Taekwondo is almost a presentation of the Korean culture and inviting people to learn about Korea and its understanding of courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, and how Korea wants to be seen. And so these martial arts forms are actually symbols of a culture, of a country. And if you combine it, obviously, with tourism, it can be very strong ways to get deeper into a country, connect with its culture and with its people as well.

One martial arts form that we haven’t mentioned, and I’m sure there are other ones that I haven’t even touched on, is Brazil with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. If you go to Rio and Sao Paulo, you can actually go into these Jiu-Jitsu academies. Even in Bangkok, you have Jiu-Jitsu academies as well where you can learn it, because Jiu-Jitsu is actually tagged as being quite healthy.

I don’t know if healthy is the right word, but from a fitness form, it is praised to be not something where you actually have some negative health inclinations after you engage in that sport. Yeah, Brazil is interesting because obviously with martial arts, it tends to be closely associated almost exclusively with Asia. And Jiu-Jitsu, of course, was founded in Japan, has moved to Brazil. But also with Brazil, you have capoeira, which is a kind of emotional, almost a dance form of combat of sorts. Brings in elements of yoga and elements of dance and bodily movement, which has become so popular around the world. And again, as you mentioned, if you go to Brazil, you’ll see that happen on the boardwalks of the beaches in Brazil.

So that’s another element, I guess, as well, Jens, where it’s not so much about, it doesn’t seem as though it’s actually about martial arts, but it is, there’s an element to it. But there’s that dance element that adds a different cultural overlay. Exactly, and I think what’s interesting is where obviously a lot of people use it as a fitness form, or some people actually want to become a competitive martial arts fighter, if it’s karate, taekwondo, I’m not sure about sumo, because it’s not me.

I think you have to be five times the size of what I am. But what’s interesting, if you look at it now from a high-yield tourism standpoint, because that’s obviously our focus, and compare what we would call the fitness traveller, the ones that do this to kind of learn the sport, learn the fighting and become fit, lose weight and better strength, so just want to have some skills in terms of self-defence, they’re normally going into one of these camps maybe for a week to a month, the ones that are really serious, even longer. But they’re normally more on a budget, and that’s maybe generalising a little bit. But yes, I mean, they’re looking to get there, and they’re focused on the fighting. But when you then compare it to the cultural traveller, the spend is actually higher. And again, that’s generalising it.

But because these people, they want to really engage in the culture, they don’t go there just for fitness, but they may kind of engage, obviously, in learning martial arts. But they’re also looking to really engage in the community, and they’re spending money that then stays in the community. And this is why this is so interesting. I think overlooked in many cases as a way to drive high-yield tourism. Now, many countries have done it. You just mentioned Japan that have packages around it, Thailand, the same thing, Korea as well. But I think it hasn’t really been promoted so much as a way of cultural tourism. It is really more tagged still as a way of, call it fitness tourism as a lack of a better word. Yeah, so coming back to your initial point, Jens, about niche tourism and passion tourism, Tai Chi in the parks in Shanghai or in China, it’s a really, really non-competitive type of martial arts, which is very much about discipline and body motion and correct posture, that kind of thing. So who’s gonna be interested, Jens? If you were promoting this globally, who would you target?

Gary, that’s actually a great question because we don’t wanna pigeonhole ourselves here just for sumo or Muay Thai or Taekwondo. When we look at passion tourism, we look at people that have a passion for a certain hobby or a certain micro-niche. So this wouldn’t be Muay Thai, it wouldn’t be sumo wrestling, it would be martial arts.

So, and these people then travel to different places in the world. So let’s take another example just to make it more illustrative. Let’s say birdwatching or stargazing, right? There are different places where I can do that. So if I’m a stargazer, I might go to Chile, I might go to Utah in the USA, I go to Finland, I might go to Alula in Saudi Arabia, and I want to experience dark sky tourism and I have a passion for that. When I’m a birdwatcher, same thing. I go to different places all over the world where I can do birdwatching and I’m part of these communities where these people then get together and it’s, I call it a tribe, that then share best practises, they motivate each other and also kind of influence each other to go into different places.

Now, if I’m a passionate martial arts cultural traveller, if that is me, yes, I would go to Japan, I would go to Korea, I would go to China, I would go to Brazil, I would go to Thailand and maybe other places as well to live out my passion for martial arts. And I think this is where destinations also can collaborate, which is actually quite interesting, which I haven’t even seen so much yet happening where, let’s say, Thailand partners with Japan, with Korea, with China to see like, okay, really targeting the martial arts passion travellers. When I worked in the Mekong region with Mekong Tourism, as you know very well, in Southeast Asia, there are passions that are cross-border, so if it is people on the culinary side and then if you go very micro-niche, if it is around, let’s say, chilli sauces and so on, or if it’s around Buddhism or if it’s around something else, you can then, in the Mekong region, for example, design a circle or a thematic route to then visit all these different places where you can explore your passion, whatever that might be.

So I think from a high-yield tourism standpoint, I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for destinations to, number one, identify their strengths, and this is going back to what we talked last time about this SOAR model, Strengths, Opportunity, Aspirations, and Results, but where you can then say, okay, what are my strengths? And let’s say it is stargazing, because I have a dark sky, and then looking at the opportunities, now how can I attract these people? What infrastructure do I need to build to satisfy these tribes? And on the aspirational side, I can say, well, I want to be one of the top stargazing dark-sky tourism destinations in the world, and by doing that, one way could be to then partner with other dark-sky tourism destinations and almost build a global trail where then people say, well, you know what? These destinations are now on my bucket list to outlive and really explore this passion of dark-sky tourism as one example. So this is obviously, as we mentioned, various examples of martial arts, and these people spend money, these people become loyal to a destination, they become advocates of a destination as well. Many times, while they go to the destination for that passion, they then also explore other things in that destination and return, and I think that’s where high yield really comes in.

So you touched there on stargazing, and we actually move this discussion into the next point, which is quite an interesting one. It’s one that I discuss with Megan Eaves on our podcast when we discuss dark-sky tourism and stargazing, and that’s the challenges that emerge when a niche tourism segment moves into the mainstream, and there are some key points there, the risk factors, commodification, over-commercialisation, and potentially cultural appropriation. These are big issues, aren’t they? And the balancing is a fine line to get it right so that if you’re actually trying to maximise the economic benefits, obviously, of these historic martial arts and historic cultural assets, but without going over the line and commodifying, how do you balance that? I think that’s a very interesting point, and before, you mentioned these packages that have been created in Japan for the various martial arts forms, and I think this is one way of tackling that because the passionate tribes about a micro-niche, they, on one hand, very quickly see if it’s over-commercialised, and they will get turned off because that is something that almost is more negative to them than even getting engaged in that micro-niche.

So I think building packages around it where you, on the very high level, you can commercialise it, yeah, going to a fight in Osaka at the Sumo Hall, or going to Bangkok and watching a Muay Thai fight and so on, or even going to one of these, what I call fake real demonstrations where it is fabricated, which you see at Asia-Tech in Bangkok with Muay Thai. That is really for the masses, and an impassionate Muay Thai or martial arts person wouldn’t even go there. It would be a turnoff for them, but it’s fine that it’s there to bring it to the masses for mass tourism, and it is obviously part of the culture of the country.

But I think having then these deep immersions, that’s where it is important, and you need to separate that. I think that’s critical. If you don’t separate it, and if these lines are blurred, then you might dilute both experiences.

So is the separation, I guess this is the key question, is the separation to maintain its niche appeal without making it too mainstream, is that pricing? Is it the level of pricing of the product, the service, the experience to try and keep it from going mainstream? I would say yes, but it’s hard to generalise, obviously, because it comes down to the experience as well. But I give you one example, which is watchmaking. So you have people that are really passionate about Swiss watches, and you can go to a Swiss watch museum in Bern, and you see watchmaking, you learn about watchmaking, and it’s authentic, and then you can go into a watchmaking, it’s not even a course, but you have to apply to get actually admitted, and there is a whole process around it, and it costs a lot of money.

I don’t have the number right now in my head, but it costs a lot of money to do that. So it’s almost like it becomes very exclusive for real passionate people that really want to immerse themselves in watchmaking. This might be an extreme example, but it might illustrate your point.

If you’re really a member of this passionate tribe, you want to be part of this community, and you want to make sure that that’s separated in a certain way. So with the Swiss watchmaking example, there is this application process in place to even make it even harder. Even if I have a million dollars and I can do the course, that doesn’t mean that I can get admitted to participate.

Yeah, participation I think is the key word there. Yeah, that course in Bern has been really, really popular with the Chinese market. It’s been marketed very, very heavily to the Chinese market.

So that’s price, Jens. As we round up, going back to the Sumo experience, for example, when you’re in the Sumo Hall, how many foreign tourists were there? Was it mostly local people? No, it was actually quite a few foreigners there. The one thing is, I would say there were a lot of Chinese.

I mean, there were a lot of Chinese in Osaka period, but the leaflet was also in Japanese, in Chinese as well, in Japanese as well. So I think you have domestic tourists from other places in Japan. You have other Asian tourists, especially from China and from Korea. And then you have some Westerners as well, because obviously Sumo has an allure, has a certain sexiness. It is Japan, and you see these huge men kind of fighting, and it’s something obviously that you don’t see anywhere else in the world. So I think there is an allure, but I would say it was mostly Asians, but that might have been just have something to do with the current tourism situation in Japan as well.It’s obviously attracting a lot of Southeast Asians and Chinese people to visit Japan. Yeah, and that’s where more challenges or opportunities actually emerge, because perceptions of Sumo, perceptions of what you want from that experience in the hall itself and then around it are gonna be different for different nationalities and also for domestic tourists as well. They’re gonna want different things because their understanding of the culture is very, very different.

A lot of Japanese will just want to observe, watch and observe. Whereas, as you say, there’s this participative nature for inbound tourists. They want to meet the Sumos. They want to challenge them or whatever. They want to be actively involved. Yes, and I think this is where Japan did such a fabulous job.

And this is why this leaflet caught my eye is that many times it’s just the fight and it’s entertainment. It’s something I do on my trip to Osaka. But then integrating these packages as well that are fairly easy to buy, but don’t scare people off right away from like, okay, you have traditional Japanese bento boxes that are part of the package you could buy. You could meet the Sumo. You can challenge a Sumo fighter, which is obviously more tongue in cheek. But again, I think it’s kind of weaving people in to at least touching the surface of the culture and appreciating it, which then again, if you are getting excited about this, might take you to another level, have you come back and also spend more money on other things.

Maybe one other thing to mention in Thailand. I mean, a lot of people buy these Muay Thai gloves. They buy these shorts as well.

So there’s another component from a revenue standpoint where you can merchandise that experience as well. Now, I don’t know how many people, let’s say from Europe or North America that buy these Muay Thai gloves and shorts would actually wear them when they’re back at home. Probably not, but it becomes a souvenir.

It becomes a connection to that culture as well. Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that. Not long ago, I was at Phuket airport talking to an American guy and he’d been in Bang Tao and he’d been training.

He was a former basketball player, very good college basketball player and hoped to play in the NBA, but he had a bad knee injury and he’d had various surgeries and he’d looked for ways for sports around the world that could help him actually increase his competitiveness but recover without doing more damage to his knee. And somebody had recommended that he go and do Muay Thai, which he’d done. And he’d been there I think for six months and he’d learn and he trained with all these local guys. He was a big guy. He was really, really into it. He had all the terminology, all the jargon. You mentioned the merchandise, the gloves and the sports. He was going back to the US and he was gonna start importing them to the US to sell to gyms and fitness centres around the US.

I think this whole concept of martial arts as a micro-niche and driving passion tourism to generate high-yield has a lot of potential. And I think still to this day as we’re looking at over tourism and mass tourism and just how can tourism be a force for good and all these kinds of things. I think this is a great example to see how a destination can look at tourism in a different way.

Yeah, absolutely. So that’s a wrap for this edition of the High Yield Tourism Podcast. My thanks to Jens for his fighting talk and another enjoyable debate.

Please join the conversation on our LinkedIn page at high-yieldtourism, has a hyphen in it, at high-yieldtourism and visit us online at highyieldtourism.com. We’ll be back soon to talk more about High-Yield Tourism. We’ll see you next time. Thank you.