We’ve all heard the news. Water guns blaring in the streets of Barcelona, heated marches in the streets of Mexico City, Paris, and Venice… Tourism’s been painted as the global bad guy that inevitably destroys everything it touches. The planet and local communities are all just inevitable victims to the industry’s insatiable, all-consuming growth.
The travel industry is changing. Lately, the industry has been covered in a flurry of buzz words—ecotourism, sustainable travel, and the “slow travel” movement, just to name a few. Though, one more transformative approach has started to gain traction in recent years: regenerative tourism.
Like many terms in tourism discourse, there is currently no universally-agreed upon definition of regenerative tourism. However, several tourism scholars have come up with working understandings of the concept. Bellato et. al has a particularly helpful one, which describes regenerative tourism as:
“A transformational approach that aims to fulfil the potential of tourism places to flourish and create net positive effects through increasing the regenerative capacity of human societies and ecosystems.”
So while the exact definition of the term might vary depending on who you’re asking, the general understanding is that regenerative tourism seeks to leave places better than they were found.
Sustainable and regenerative tourism share the similar goal of making tourism less extractive, but they have differing approaches. “Sustainable” asks the question, what changes do we need to make to continue business as is? How do we adjust our practices to be less extractive, so we can more mindfully use the resources we have longer into the future? Maybe the answer is decreasing water usage, or creating a program that gives back to the community. While these are all positive changes to the travel industry, sustainable tourism doesn’t address the underlying faults with the system itself.
“Regenerative”, on the other hand, asks us to reimagine a new model—one that is not built on the same system that extracts wealth from resources, but rather creates a new dynamic entirely. Regenerative tourism is about utilizing the power of the tourism industry to improve the environment and livelihoods of local destinations.
While sustainable tourism might look to improve the industry so that it can operate without actively creating harm to the local environment and community, regenerative tourism looks to create positive outcomes for all involved.
Rebecca Soon is a regenerative tourism expert based in Hawaiʻi, a destination which has struggled with overcrowding, environmental degradation, and an unmatched strain on natural resources over the last few decades. With an economy wholly-dependent on an extractive tourism industry, Hawaiʻi’s model of tourism has simply become too much for the community to handle.
Instead of simply moving away from the travel industry as a whole, regenerative tourism supporters look to harness the power of tourism to address some of the state’s challenges. As Soon puts it, “regenerative travel is led by the question: how do I have a more reciprocal relationship with the place I’m visiting?
One of the key aspects of regenerative tourism is that these initiatives are created and managed by local individuals, and that the benefit is felt directly in these communities. This could take many forms such as local, regenerative farm-stays, managed access programs, community-led cultural performances, or conservation volunteer programs that look to restore and replenish degraded ecosystems.
Example 1. Local farm-stays and regenerative agriculture tourism
Local farms are a particularly great example in Hawaiʻi, as they help promote food sovereignty in an island chain where over 90% of all food is imported from across the ocean. If a small, local farm needs to create a touristic element to support their operations (such as tours, farm-stays, or cooking-classes for example), this helps the community by economically investing in local food systems.
Example 2. Managed access programs
In an effort to address overcrowding and generate income for local community initiatives, some destinations have opted for managed access programs that help curb the number of visitors to a place at any given time. On the North Shore of the island of Kauaʻi, for example, the group Hui Makaʻainana o Makana implemented a ticketed reservation system that charges out-of-state visitors an entrance fee to the ever-popular Hāʻena State Park. Not only did this initiative curb over tourism to the area, it also created full-time employment for many hyper-local residents who became parking attendants, bus-drivers, and greeters. The generated funds were also reinvested directly into environmental conservation projects on the land to help restore previously-degraded ecosystems. The project was such a success that the local community is looking to expand the initiative and replicate it across the state.
Example 3. Community-led cultural experiences:
Cultural performances created and shared by the communities and cultures who have been practicing them for generations are another key example of regenerative tourism. In Hawaiʻi, this might look like moving away from the commercialized version of a lūʻau performance and instead have smaller, community-led presentations of oli and hula by Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) on their own terms. These more intimate experiences prioritize sharing and collaboration than visuals and spectacle. It’s a way to keep traditions alive and have the communities practice and share them with visitor on their own term, while avoiding these becoming potentially voyeuristic or extractive.
One of the challenges with regenerative travel is that it is difficult to scale. In a way, though, that’s kind of the whole point. By promoting a smaller tourism industry that is more integrated within local businesses and initiatives, communities can ensure that tourism operates as a positive force within a larger ecosystem.
Regenerative tourism also very location-dependent: what might work in one place might be completely different to any other destinations. That also makes for great opportunities to experiment with different iterations of regenerative tourism and figure which programs work best for each individual locale.
Tourism does not have to be this catastrophic force that inevitably destroys everything it touches. Regenerative models of tourism give us another alternative to instead use the power of the industry for good. If we give power to communities to create their own tourism models that work and support their own needs, then hosting visitors from across the world becomes a point of strength rather than a burden. As Rebecca Soon points out, “visitors can absolutely be a partner in creating a vibrant and abundant Hawaiʻi.”
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