A passion for sharing Japanese martial arts and craftsmanship has transformed Kendo Experience into a booming cultural hub in Kyoto, with 83% year-over-year growth.
While many visitors to Japan focus on sightseeing and shopping, Kengo Tone and his wife, Ling, noticed a growing appetite for something different: a desire to get hands-on with Japanese traditions. What they’ve built in Kyoto began in 2018 as a weekend kendo workshop for beginners, which quickly gained traction until the COVID pandemic. They realized then how much they missed connecting with travelers from across the globe and decided to dive back in full-time. Recognizing that tourists wanted more active, challenging activities, they expanded beyond kendo to include authentic Japanese knife forging and ninja weapon making.
Today, Kendo Experience operates three studios in Kyoto, employs 14 full-time staff, and is driven by a commitment to authenticity, supported by a strong partnership with GetYourGuide. The duo has welcomed over 30,000 happy guests in the last year.
Here, Ling shares their journey and how working with GetYourGuide has given them the confidence to scale.
How did Kendo Experience start?
I started this business with my husband, Kengo. I actually also worked as a business consultant in Japan until last month, but the time has come to work with Kengo full-time. My husband is a kendo player, and he also managed an Italian restaurant in Kyoto. We had many international friends who were interested in kendo, but they didn’t know how to start, and didn’t have time to train all day. They wanted to understand the culture and try it as complete beginners.
We decided to start a kendo experience workshop, share the basic knowledge of kendo culture, and give them a first step. We started it as a weekend, part-time business. My husband demonstrated movements and explained the culture in Japanese, and I handled reservations and translation.
How has the travel market in Japan changed since you started?
About 10 years ago, when I first came to Japan, many people were more interested in shopping because the Japanese yen was cheap compared to the dollar. People came for Japanese food, shopping, and visiting temples and shrines. Recently, I think there’s a trend toward creating something by yourself and taking home that experience, rather than buying things.
What led you to expand from kendo classes into knife forging and ninja weapon making?
When we started, at least in Kyoto, nobody was doing the same thing. But many guests who were interested in kendo were also interested in katana (Japanese samurai sword). They asked where they could get a real katana and if they could bring it back to their country. Real katana are very expensive, and you can’t bring something like that through an airport. So we thought: why not create an experience where guests can make something smaller as a souvenir and also have a good time?
We looked for someone with knife-making skills, and we were lucky because in my husband’s hometown, there’s a “knife village” with professional knife makers. At first, they told us beginners couldn’t forge their own knife, even with supervision. We kept talking and asked them to teach us.
Making a full-size katana can take several days, and even a kitchen knife can take five or six hours for a professional. We didn’t want guests to spend more than a day of their trip on it, so we worked out how beginners could make a knife in two or three hours. After that, guests also said they wanted something connected to ninja culture, so we designed a process for beginners to make ninja weapons.
How important has your partnership with GetYourGuide been in that growth?
Around two years ago, a friend told me, “Don’t you know GetYourGuide? It’s a great booking site, I use it every time.” I decided to list all our experiences on GetYourGuide, and it worked very well. The most impressive thing was the speed. On other sites, new reservations came slowly. When I listed on GetYourGuide, I immediately got many reservations.
Even now, bookings from GetYourGuide are more than 50% of our total income, so it’s very important for us. Compared to other sites, where you might get bookings mostly from one or two countries, GetYourGuide reaches people worldwide.
When did you realize the GetYourGuide partnership was having a tangible impact on your business?
As our business grew, we heard that the CEO of GetYourGuide actually chose our experience for part of his honeymoon. I think he was impressed, because then we were invited to a summit in Bangkok, and later, a GetYourGuide manager contacted us.
She gave us ideas on refining our titles and choosing better pictures. For example, one of our newer experiences wasn’t performing well. She suggested adding high-search English keywords like ‘ninja’ or ‘samurai’ to the title. I updated the listing, and we saw an immediate increase in bookings.
How do you use data and insights from the platform to optimize your business?
We list on several OTA platforms, but I think the best information comes through our GetYourGuide manager. The most useful data for me was demand forecasting. We don’t have enough historical data to forecast demand confidently, and forecasting is difficult. It affects decisions like whether we should open a new shop — without enough reservations that would hurt revenue, but if we don’t expand, we might miss opportunities.
The team at GetYourGuide showed me solid data and made us more confident about opening one or two more shops because demand was increasing, and we were often sold out.
Has GetYourGuide helped you address any specific challenges?
We were concerned about cancellation rates and possible reasons people cancel. Our GetYourGuide manager suggested that if we make it easy to change the date, more people will reschedule rather than cancel. She also suggested adjusting the cancellation policy so people feel more comfortable booking.
We changed the policy and made improvements to titles and photos, and it led to more guests completing our experiences. Now, if guests want to change the date or time, they can click a button. Even today, I’ve seen more than 10 emails notifying me that guests have changed dates or times. If GetYourGuide didn’t have that function, I think at least five of those groups would have canceled and never rebooked.
Can you share a standout piece of feedback or a favorite moment with a guest?
We have many wonderful guests. From the family who visited with a very small baby and thanked us for helping them create a beautiful family connection, to the two brothers from Spain who we thought would be no-shows on a snowy night. We ended up having ramen with them after the kendo experience.
You often only meet these guests once in your life, but you share a wonderful time, which is why I am so happy to do this full-time now.
How do you ensure you consistently deliver a high-quality, authentic experience?
I don’t want people to come and just cosplay kendo or make a cheap imitation knife. Even if they’re beginners and only here for two or three hours, I want them to experience something real. In each experience, we start by sharing the cultural background, how Japanese people did this in the past, and why.
Then we do the hands-on part. We also use the best materials we can get. For the kendo experience, we collect equipment from professional kendo players who are friends of my husband. I don’t want it to be only taking photos for social media, and then it’s over. I want guests to stay interested after they go home.
What are your growth plans for the future?
I want to open a new shop in Okinawa this year. We want to create something new, maybe something even we haven’t experienced. We want to learn it ourselves as beginners. When we learn the skill and feel confident teaching it, we know how to teach beginners because we were beginners too.
For Okinawa, we want to teach Okinawa culture. For example, learning how to make a stone knife in a very traditional Okinawan way. We’re going to learn how to do it ourselves this month.
What is GetYourGuide’s role in your strategy?
I would say working with GetYourGuide is a wonderful way to reach visitors from all over the world. For us, the platform plays two very important roles. First, as a reservation site, it is our channel to talk to people globally and invite them to experience Japan with us.
Second, it has strong finance and analytics functions. I can see exactly how my business is performing compared to last month or last year, find where any problems are, and know exactly what actions to take to improve. It’s invaluable to us now. Essential.
Key takeaways
- Offer genuine cultural immersion. Kendo Experience stands out by providing authentic, hands-on experiences rather than superficial tourist activities, satisfying a growing desire among travelers to learn new skills and engage deeply with local traditions.
- Leverage platform tools to reduce cancellations. By utilizing GetYourGuide's flexible booking options, Kendo Experience allowed guests to easily change their dates rather than cancel outright, successfully retaining bookings that would otherwise have been lost.
- Use data to expand confidently. Kendo Experience validated the need for a new studio from GetYourGuide’s demand forecasting analytics, giving them the data-backed confidence to scale up.
- Optimize listings for visibility. Updating listings to include high-search-volume keywords and more engaging photos led to an immediate increase in bookings.
- Partnering for global reach yields results. Working with OTAs allowed Kendo Experience to tap into a worldwide audience. GetYourGuide currently drives over 50% of its total income, and the company boasts an 83% year-to-date revenue growth.
