Do I still believe in Regenerative Tourism?

The Summer of 2026 has felt like a watershed summer.  I’ve found myself asking myself lots of slightly uncomfortable questions. One in particular has been prompted by a few different conversations with some professional tourism friends (one thinking of offering a regenerative tourism course on a global scale, one moving into a new career path rooted in regenerative principles and one completing a thesis on the practicality of balancing growth and regeneration). Here it is: 

Do I still believe in Regenerative Tourism? 

It’s an odd question for me to be asking. While Regenerative tourism only really entered my vocabulary around 2020, borne of Covid-era webinars, the thinking behind it had been part of my working life since I first started in tourism. In fact, I startled to attention on one particular webinar when the globally esteemed speaker cited ‘The Burren Project’ that I had collaborated on for a long number of years, as a particularly fine example of regenerative tourism in practice. 

‘Is that what it was?’ I found myself asking. I was hooked from then on and, with plenty of Covid time on my hands, I got deep into learning about regenerative tourism.  I learned a lot. Most importantly, I found that ‘Regenerative Tourism’ put words on what I was already thinking but hadn’t quite formulated. 

Regenerative Tourism gave me a framework and a language. It gave me better questions to ask. It introduced me to a community of thinkers. 

For a while, it felt as though regenerative tourism was becoming a real thing, gathering real momentum. There was curiosity and energy around it.  There was funding and spaces in conferences and policy documents. Leaders wanted to talk about tourism leaving places better rather than simply doing less harm.  

That energy feels different now. Budgets and language have shifted. Places that had stopped naming visitor number growth as their target have started using it again. Some of the strongest voices in regenerative tourism appear increasingly disillusioned with tourism itself. At times there is almost a sense of giving up on tourism’s capacity to become regenerative at all. 

The terminology has become contested too. There is a lot of discussion about who is genuinely regenerative, who understands the term properly, who is using it correctly and who is just brazenly using it for marketing value. 

So I find myself asking a harder version of the question: 

What does Regenerative Tourism ask me to believe anyway? 

To answer that, I had to dig a little under the terminology.

I revisited some of my own writing. What struck me was how long I have been wrestling with the same issue. Back in 2021, I was already writing about how compelling the theory of regenerative tourism could be while the practice remained elusive — conceptual, daunting and difficult to translate into action (see 5 opportunities and 5 challenges of Regenerative Tourism)  

Then I went back to regenerative thinking itself – to the courses I have done, the mentors I’ve worked with and the thinkers I have followed. 

While there is no single universally agreed list of regenerative principles, certain ideas recur strongly: seeing places and communities as living, interconnected systems; working from the particular context and potential of place; recognising and working from our relationship with nature; creating agency and working collectively; learning and adapting rather than assuming a fixed answer; and redefining success around flourishing, renewal and positive contribution rather than simply doing less harm. 

Deeply understanding regeneration takes time. It can take years of reading, listening, practice and reflection before some of the thinking really settles. All the same, stripping it back to leading principles made me realise that I probably believe in them more strongly now than I ever did. 

What has changed is perhaps my understanding of how difficult the transition really is. 

Earlier this year, in The Place Paradigm, I described tourism as being in an Era of Navigation: an uncomfortable space between two different operating logics. The old model remains very much alive and dominant - tourism as an economic engine, growth as success, numbers as the dominant signal of performance - while leaders are simultaneously being asked to hold a much wider mandate around communities, ecology, culture, resilience and the long-term vitality of place. 

I probably once imagined that transition as more linear than it really is. I've realised it’s a spectrum and we can oscillate forwards and backwards. Governments can recommit to old measures while communities persist in asking different questions. One destination experiments while another pulls back. Language can move faster than policy. Policy can move faster than practice and vice versa. 

We are definitely navigating a new course rather than following the old map. 

So what do I believe in then? 

This exercise has helped me get clearer on that. 

• I believe tourism should increase the vitality of a place. Economic vitality sits very high in that for me. Tourism should generate substantial economic benefit. It should allow families to have sustained and reasonably predictable incomes, solid businesses that allow them to plan for the future and allow people to build careers and commit themselves to living in a place for the long term. Tourism destinations should deliver high and consistent income to the host community. 

• I believe tourism should preserve, celebrate and strengthen the unique identity of a place. It should give local people confidence that where they live is special and that its landscape or streetscape, culture, food, stories and ways of life have value. The place is ultimately the source of the tourism product. Strengthening that source is good for the place and good for tourism. 

• I believe tourism should be consciously shaped with the people who live and work in a place. Communities do not need to become tourism experts or control every tourism decision. They do need to understand what is happening, experience genuine benefit, have a voice in the trade-offs and feel that tourism is happening with some degree of permission and shared intent. None of this should be left to chance. We should aim for destinations where local people celebrate tourism – not accommodate it, tolerate it, endure it or remain distant from it. 

• I believe tourism should do much more than sustain what we have right now. Ecosystems are already depleted. Carbon emissions are just too high. Communities already feel fragile. Culture and difference is under pressure. Housing is strained. Why would maintaining the current condition be the height of tourism’s ambition? If a place accommodates tourism, it’s absolutely reasonable to expect that tourism helps leave that place stronger. 

• I believe tourism can strengthen the fabric of our places and the quality of our lives. It can bring cohesion to communities, make identity more visible and valued, connect businesses, communities and agencies, create a sense of belonging and give people greater confidence in what makes their place different. In an age of AI, when more of life is becoming virtual, standardised and automated, I find tourism to be a tonic for our times. Tourism continues to deal in real places, real people, real landscapes, real encounters, real memories. It deals in difference. There is something enormously valuable and nourishing in that.  

None of this means that I think growth is bad. Quite the opposite. I have written at length recently about the Tipping Point, so I won’t make the whole argument again here. More tourism can create more vitality - visitors spend, businesses grow, jobs are created, services become viable, confidence and investment follow, communities strengthen.  For a long time, more really does mean more. It simply cannot mean more indefinitely in every place. The difficulty is an operating logic in which growth in the number remains the permanent definition of success. 

I believe tourism is capable of holding two things true at once. Working to ensure tourism delivers economically is an priority. Working to ensure the long-term vitality of the place on which that economy depends can be an equal priority. 

Can I realistically expect other people to believe the same? 

This may be the most important question. 

It is relatively easy for me to write, think and talk about regenerative tourism and to argue for a different approach. It is much harder for the person who has to walk into an office on Monday morning and deliver on a policy.  I once had a senior tourism leader say exactly that to me after a long conversation about different ways of thinking about tourism: 

“Tina, I buy into regenerative tourism hook, line and sinker...but I still have a policy to implement.” 

I have thought about that conversation many times since.  

Public-sector tourism leaders work inside government mandates, political cycles, funding structures, legislation, annual targets, organisational KPIs and very real expectations around economic performance. And, as I said earlier, understanding regeneration deeply takes time. 

If regenerative tourism requires people to understand and adopt the whole philosophy before they can use the thinking, I am not sure it can ever find an avenue into mainstream practice. It has to be able to converse in the real world.

That means showing up in some very practical places: what we target, what we measure, what outcomes we name and ultimately what decisions we make. We don’t have to believe in regenerative tourism to explicitly and credibly work towards several outcomes at once: a strong economy, a healthy natural environment, a confident community, a living culture and a distinctive place with a future. 

I’m sure we can carry those things alongside one another. Most tourism strategies and policies do. They just don’t measure them and set targets for them. They assume these outcomes flow from achieving the number. Evidence tells us that is an unproven assumption. Evidence from the very places that were so successful in growing numbers that the number became a burden to the place prove that it's a false assumption

Why do I keep coming back to place? 

The more I think about all of this, the more I keep arriving back at one word: Place. 

Tourism is routinely described as an industry. In reality, it is a sector that is inseparable from the place where it happens. It is woven through almost everything that happens in a place: economy, infrastructure, landscape, culture, environment, housing, community life.  

It is a system whether or not we use systems language. I increasingly think that the concept of  'place' gives us a way of understanding that system without having to explain systems thinking first. Place is immediately understood in a way that regeneration isn’t. While people may come to it from very different roles, interests and responsibilities, they instinctively already know what a place is, what it means to them and why people care enough to argue about it.

They may want very different things from it and for it. At least though they have something in common to disagree about.  We often aspire to 'getting everyone on the same page'. In tourism, place is that page – it’s the point of common purpose and the most powerful point from which meaningful collaboration can start.  

That is one reason I keep returning to it. 

Another is that place naturally holds the things regenerative thinking is trying to hold together: Economy, Nature, Culture, Community, Identity, Potential, Belonging. 

Tourism flows through all of them. 

Perhaps we have spent too long treating place as tourism’s raw material: something to package, market and consume. Regenerative Tourism sees place as the source – the thing that gives tourism life. 

That brings me back to the question at the heart of The Place Paradigm: 

how do we shift the focus from growing tourism to growing the places that make tourism possible?

I believe that the shift is not seismic but can have seismic consequences. Rather than ask us to forego economic ambition, it simply asks us to pursue that ambition in pursuit of a larger one.

What if I stop believing? 

If regenerative tourism is too idealistic, too complex, too contested or simply no longer fashionable, what ambition takes its place? 

There are, of course, many excellent sustainable and responsible tourism approaches that continue to move tourism forward. If we abandon the larger ambition that tourism should actively strengthen the places on which it depends, however, where does that leave us? 

Growing until something tells us to stop? Mitigating the problems as they emerge? Sustaining whatever condition we happen to have inherited? Rehabilitating places after tourism has already pushed them beyond what they can comfortably carry? Waiting until housing, ecology, or infrastructure forces a correction? Negotiating with a disgruntled or hostile host community? 

I can’t find much in those alternatives that I would be prepared to stand for.  

So, do I believe in Regenerative Tourism? 

Yes. I believe I have been in places regenerated and vitalised by tourism. I believe very strongly in what it asks tourism to achieve - it asks us to widen the definition of success and seek wide and deep growth, not just upward growth. I believe it stretches us into the next era, that it brings us into uncharted territory and that it lays down a challenge that we are undoubtedly able to rise to.

I am perhaps less attached than I once was to the label - I was never interested in defending a definition.  I am increasingly impatient for the principles to move out of the realm of aspiration and into strategy, measurement, investment and decision-making. 

This exercise has left me certain that the Era of Navigation is real, that we are navigating beyind the Eras of Management and Mitigation and towards the Era of Stewardship. I believe Place is the compass.  

Right now, Regenerative Tourism asks tourism's leaders to hold two things true at once: the need to deliver economic performance now, and the need to strengthen the long-term vitality of the places on which that performance ultimately depends. 

It asks us not to wait for every policy, metric and funding mechanism around us to change before we begin navigating in that direction.  

While we may not be able to arrive at Stewardship in one bound (we can only ever take the next step in front of us, after all), choosing a more aspirational destination and charting a way towards it is the work of tourism leadership now.