Regenerative tourism vs sustainable tourism: what actually changes

What is the difference between sustainable and regenerative tourism? In short, sustainable tourism sets out to reduce and balance tourism's impacts so that a place is not degraded; regenerative tourism sets out to leave the place, and the people and ecosystems in it, with more capacity to thrive than before. The debate over regenerative tourism vs sustainable tourism is often presented as a simple upgrade. It is better read as a change in the question being asked, made by an idea with a shorter track record and a thinner evidence base. This explainer sets out where the two differ, where they overlap, and where the critics have a point.

Sustainable tourism: a shared definition and a measurement system

Sustainable tourism has an internationally used definition. The World Tourism Organization, now UN Tourism, describes it as tourism "that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities" ¹. In March 2024 the UN Statistical Commission adopted the Statistical Framework for Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism, which UN Tourism calls the internationally agreed reference framework for measuring tourism's economic, social and environmental dimensions ². Whatever its limits, sustainable tourism can be defined, audited and, increasingly, counted.

What regenerative tourism adds

Regenerative tourism has no equivalent official definition. Its proponents argue that it differs from sustainability in four ways.

From doing less harm to net positive. The architect Bill Reed described sustainability in the built environment as "primarily an exercise in efficiency", and placed regenerative design at the far end of a trajectory that begins with limiting damage ³. The researchers John Robinson and Raymond Cole later called this "a net-positive approach to sustainability" ⁴. Anna Pollock brought the argument to tourism in a 2019 keynote: "sustainable practices address symptoms and enable us to do less harm" ⁵.

From parts to systems. Sustainability tools usually split impacts into separate indicators, such as energy, water, waste and jobs. Regenerative thinking starts from the whole. Dianne Dredge argued that tourism "must be managed as a complex adaptive system" ⁶, and Loretta Bellato and colleagues describe tourism as a living system in which stakeholders play interdependent roles ⁷.

From generic to place-based. Reed's regenerative design takes a place — a community, a watershed, a bioregion — as its scope ³, and Daniel Christian Wahl framed regenerative cultures around the biocultural conditions of each place ⁹. A regenerative strategy for a reef island should therefore look different from one for a historic city.

From consultation to who decides. The framework by Bellato, Niki Frantzeskaki and Christian Nygaard draws on Indigenous perspectives and knowledge systems alongside Western science ⁸. Pauline Sheldon argues that regenerative tourism differs from sustainability in kind, not degree, because it requires changes in mindsets, values and systems, for example replacing shareholder wealth with stakeholder well-being as tourism's goal ¹¹. That raises a question sustainability frameworks often leave implicit: who sets the goals? In Flanders, whose tourism agency adopted a vision built on these ideas, a 2023 survey of residents in five art cities found that only one in five felt they could be heard on their concerns or ideas about tourism, while four in ten wanted more say in tourism policy ¹⁰.

Regenerative vs sustainable tourism, side by side

The comparison below is our synthesis of the sources above. Real programmes usually mix both.

• Core question: sustainable — how do we reduce and balance impacts? Regenerative — what becomes healthier because tourism is here?
• Unit of attention: sustainable — the business or the sector. Regenerative — the place and its living systems.
• Typical tools: sustainable — criteria, indicators and certification. Regenerative — participation, long-term relationships and learning, ideally backed by measurement.
• Who decides: sustainable — often government and industry, consulting residents. Regenerative — residents, custodians and visitors as co-stewards.
• Evidence today: sustainable — established frameworks and a UN statistical standard. Regenerative — mostly conceptual, with few independent evaluations.

The difference between sustainable and regenerative tourism is not a clean break

Reed himself insisted that the levels of his trajectory are "a progression", each nested in the next, and that all of them are necessary ³. Regenera Luxury, with which this publication is affiliated, takes a similar line in its essay on what regenerative travel really means: reducing harm is the foundation, and regeneration goes further by aiming for measurable positive impact ²⁴. Its glossary summarises the contrast in one line: "Sustainability seeks to maintain and reduce harm; regeneration seeks to renew and improve" ²⁵. In practice, a hotel that has not measured its own energy and water use is in no position to claim it is improving a watershed.

Where the critiques are

Vagueness. Janith Iddawala and Diane Lee's 2025 review found the concept "shrouded in ambiguity", which, they argue, hinders its use in tourism planning ¹². The field is also small: a 2024 scientometric study found only 27 documents on regenerative tourism or travel in the Web of Science, against several thousand on sustainable tourism ¹³. Sheldon has described a "vacuum of knowledge" about the subject ¹¹.

Greenwashing risk. A broad, aspirational word is easy to borrow. Sheldon warns of "regenerative washing" ¹¹, and a 2026 essay in the journal Pasos asks whether regenerative tourism is a paradigm shift or a rebranding of sustainability, identifying risks of co-optation, greenwashing and extractive logics alongside its potential for ecological and social repair ¹⁴. Regulators are tightening the rules for both vocabularies: from 27 September 2026, EU consumer law bans generic environmental claims that a trader cannot substantiate, and claims of a neutral, reduced or positive impact based on offsetting ¹⁵.

Measurement. Dredge urged readers to "forget tools like sustainability criteria and certification schemes that contribute little" ⁶. It is a fair warning against box-ticking, but it leaves open how anyone would know whether a place is flourishing. Early adopters admit the gap. Visit Flanders wrote in 2018 that it had "still to determine how we will measure success" under its new model ¹⁶. In the Faroe Islands, stakeholders interviewed by Nordregio pointed to the absence of comprehensive measurement of tourism's impacts ¹⁷. In Copenhagen, a headline result of CopenPay's 2025 season was that 70% of participants "report plans" to keep green habits at home, a self-reported intention rather than an observed change ¹⁸.

What the difference looks like on the ground

The destinations we follow show both logics at work, often within the same policy.

Bhutan's 'high value, low volume' policy raised its Sustainable Development Fee to US$200 a night when the country reopened in 2022, and cut it to US$100 a year later ²³. A visitor fee is a classic sustainability instrument; whether it is regenerative depends on what it funds and who benefits, which our analysis of Bhutan's fee examines.

Copenhagen's strategy 'The End of Tourism as We Know It' held that visitor growth is not a goal in itself, but increasing the value of visitors for all parties is ¹⁹. That is a regenerative question; our assessment of CopenPay shows how hard it is to answer with the data now published.

Hawaiʻi's Green Fee law directs general funds approximating its new revenue to be spent equally on natural resources, disaster resilience and the visitor experience and its impacts ²⁰. Restoring native forests is regenerative in intent, but money spent is not the same as an outcome achieved, a gap traced in our Green Fee analysis.

In the Greater Maasai Mara, more than 15,000 landowners receive lease fees from wildlife conservancies ²¹, a model in which tourism income pays people to keep land open to wildlife. Yet the fenced area in the wider ecosystem increased by 170% between 2010 and 2020, led largely by smallholders securing their land titles ²². A sustainability lens counts the conservancies; a systems lens also asks what is happening at their edges.

In the Faroe Islands, a 2024 law introduced a nightly visitor fee earmarked for maintaining paths and tourism planning ²⁶. It carries more weight than the volunteer weekend examined in our case study, 'Closed for maintenance'.

Which matters more?

For a destination or a traveller, the useful question is not which label to adopt but which claims can be shown. Sustainable practice, which means measuring energy, water, waste, wages and visitor flows, is the floor. Regenerative tourism raises the ceiling by asking whether a place and its people end up with more capacity than before, and who decided what "better" means. Until that second question is answered with baselines and independent evidence, regenerative is best read as a direction, not a status. Our evidence scale for regeneration claims is built on that distinction, and our guide to what regenerative travel is sets out the idea's origins and the questions travellers can ask.