Institute of Travel & Tourism

ABSTRACT Kalarippayattu, an ancient martial art from Kerala, India, is renowned for its physical agility, diverse combat techniques, and spiritual discipline. This study explores its commercialization, particularly within wellness tourism, while addressing the challenge of preserving authenticity. It also investigates Kalarippayattu's potential in fitness, alternative medicine, and education. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders, the research adopts deductive thematic analysis, guided by the Resource-Based View (RBV) and Experiential Marketing Theory. The findings highlight Kalarippayattu's cultural significance, health benefits, and broader commercial appeal. However, increasing tourist demand risks diluting its traditional essence. To address this, the study proposes a framework that balances commercialization with authenticity, accommodating diverse interests in cultural immersion, wellness, and adventure. The framework emphasizes the importance of digital marketing, strategic partnerships, and institutional support in ensuring sustainable commercialization. The study underscores the need to preserve Kalarippayattu's heritage while enhancing its market potential, offering a roadmap for its expansion into new sectors without compromising cultural integrity.

Tourism plays a key role in promoting growth, development, and livelihoods. It strengthens “social foundations” and creates sustainable values through its multiplier effects and interconnectedness with Sustainable Development Goals. Equally important are tourism’s environmental impacts, carbon footprints, and greenhouse gas emissions, which are likely to exacerbate by rising global tourism and unending demands for materials, resources, and products. Thus, the prevalent ‘business as usual’ production approach is widely questioned, and decoupling the socioeconomic development from environmental impacts is emphasized to lay down the basis of sustainable and smart green tourism by applying circular economy principles in tourism. The coronavirus, though it was an irreparable disaster for tourism, gave an opportunity to rebuild it on circular economy principles. This paper explored the interlinkages between the circular economy and the tourism industry from the perspective of building a circular ecosystem in tourism, given its interdependence and interconnectedness. The approach followed is qualitative and exploratory, and reviews the available literature, which is fragmented and scattered. It brings out that deep interlinkages exist between the circular economy and travel and tourism; and the circular economy principles’ application (6Rs - refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, refurbish, recycle) in tourism can contribute substantially towards resilient tourism ecosystem and social and economic progress through reduced consumption of primary energy sources and materials. The practical and theoretical implications are clearly visible to all stakeholders, including managers, policymakers, and organizations. Managers face a challenge to find ways and means to initiate a transition to a circular economy in tourism to bring down the circularity gap. Since this study is not sector-specific and assumes the availability of technical abilities, engineering skills, government policies, and institutional structures for products and services, etc., these areas can be taken up as future research areas.

Abstract There is a huge gap in defining the core concept of destination, performance and its marketing / management organisation. This review paper intends to study the aforesaid gap and aid the concept in defining it from different perspectives. The chosen study also highlights the burning need of researchers and students alike in serving the definitional aspect from the literature point of view. The main focus is however on the gaps between defining Destination, Destination Performance and Destination Management / Marketing Organisations (DMOs). We bring in the literature review to define the concepts for today’s scholars as transfiguring for the current tourism industry. In considering the factors affecting the performance of a destination, the research considered eight specific variables i.e., revenue generation, employment generation, investment in tourism-related business, development of basic infrastructure, cultural exchange between tourists and host communities, increasing number of parks and recreational facilities, intra-generational equity and inter-generational equity. These variables were chosen on the merits that make a destination successful in the true sense. The findings also bring insights from the tourism industry to understand better all the key stakeholders. The definitions and model derived can be a supporting pillar for planners and managers of DMOs in crafting a suitable strategy to obtain a better performance from all stakeholders. The main significance of the findings is to help various government departments, agencies, consultancies and NTOs who can visualise and actively use these definitions for policy planning and implementation. This is also a step forward towards regaining the importance of destination with performance, management, marketing and organisation.