What is regenerative travel? A guide to the idea, its principles and how to tell

Regenerative travel is the idea that a visit can leave a place better able to thrive, not merely less damaged than it might otherwise have been. The phrase now appears on hotel websites, in destination strategies and in tour brochures, usually without explanation. This guide sets out where the idea comes from, what its principles are, what it looks like in the destinations we report on, what it is not, and how a traveller can tell the difference. Throughout, we treat regenerative as a direction of travel rather than a status that any place or business has reached.

What is regenerative travel?

There is no single legal or official definition. The most widely cited academic framing comes from Loretta Bellato and colleagues, who describe regenerative tourism as "a transformational approach that aims to fulfil the potential of tourism places to flourish", creating net positive effects by increasing the regenerative capacity of human societies and ecosystems ¹. Regenera Luxury's glossary of regenerative hospitality, written for hotels, puts it more plainly: an approach to tourism "that aims to leave destinations, ecosystems and communities measurably better off" ¹⁷.

Two words in those definitions do most of the work. Flourish moves the goal from limiting damage to strengthening the health of a place. Measurably concedes that a claim to make things better needs evidence. In everyday use, regenerative travel and regenerative tourism mean the same thing: the first is the traveller's term, the second the planner's. Our own working glossary for regenerative destinations explains how we use the related terms.

Where the idea of regenerative tourism comes from

The vocabulary was borrowed from design and ecology. In a 2007 paper in Building Research & Information, the architect Bill Reed argued that sustainability, as practised in buildings, was "primarily an exercise in efficiency" ³. He set out a trajectory running from high-performance and green design, which aim to limit damage or do no harm, through sustainable and restorative design, to regenerative design, whose scope is a whole place — a community, a watershed, a bioregion — and whose aim is the continuing co-evolution of people and the living systems around them ³⁴. In a later essay he wrote that regeneration "means to contribute to the value-generating processes of the living systems of which we are part" ⁵. The researchers John Robinson and Raymond Cole later called this kind of thinking "a net-positive approach to sustainability" ⁴.

Daniel Christian Wahl's Designing Regenerative Cultures (2016) widened the frame from buildings to societies, asking how people can work together to create regenerative cultures suited to the biocultural conditions of each place ⁶.

Anna Pollock, founder of Conscious.Travel, carried the idea into tourism. In a keynote to a European Travel Commission workshop in Kraków in February 2019, titled "Flourishing Beyond Sustainability: The Promise of a Regenerative Tourism", she argued that "sustainable practices address symptoms and enable us to do less harm", that a destination is a living system rather than a production line, and that tourism bodies should build the capacity of local communities to shape how they welcome visitors ⁷. She had already tested the idea with practitioners: in October 2017 she introduced the concept of a 'flourishing' destination to about 130 tourism professionals in Flanders ⁸, the beginning of the programme we examine in Flanders' Travel to Tomorrow.

Academic work followed. A framework by Bellato, Niki Frantzeskaki and Christian Nygaard in Tourism Geographies, built from practitioner consultations and a review of theory and practice, draws on Indigenous perspectives and knowledge systems alongside Western science and sets out five design dimensions and seven practice principles ¹². A companion paper, co-written with Pollock and Reed among others, describes tourism as a living system with five roles: stewarding, hosting, guesting, communing and placing ¹. In the same year Dianne Dredge argued that regeneration requires work on systems, mindsets and practice, and described it as "a capacity-building journey, not an outcome, a plan or single output" ⁹.

The principles of regenerative travel

A 2025 review of the literature by Janith Iddawala and Diane Lee found the concept still "shrouded in ambiguity", but identified recurring pillars across its definitions ¹⁰. Read alongside the work above, they suggest five working principles:

• Community at the centre. Residents shape tourism rather than simply hosting it ¹⁰.
• An ecological worldview. People are treated as part of the systems they visit, not as outside them ⁷¹⁰.
• Living-systems thinking. Tourism is managed as one part of an interdependent whole, not as a separate industry ¹⁹.
• Place first. Plans start from a particular watershed, reef or neighbourhood rather than a template ³⁶.
• Net positive outcomes. The aim is to leave ecosystems and communities with more capacity than before, which implies measuring them ¹¹⁰.

What regenerative tourism looks like in destinations

No destination we cover has shown, through independent evaluation, that it is regenerating. Several are building parts of the machinery, and their gaps are as instructive as their progress.

In Flanders, the tourism agency reframed tourism as a means of creating value for residents and places. Its own 2018 account admitted that success was still judged by more arrivals, receipts and turnover, and that it had "still to determine how we will measure success" under the new model ⁸.

Palau asks visitors to sign a pledge stamped in their passports, but its weightier commitment is at sea: since 1 January 2020 its national marine sanctuary has closed 80% of the country's waters to fishing, mining and other extraction ¹³. Our analysis of the Palau Pledge and its limits looks at what the promise has and has not been shown to change.

In the Faroe Islands, a 2024 law introduced a fee of DKK 20 a night, capped at DKK 200, for visitors aged 16 and over in paid accommodation, with the income earmarked for maintaining hiking paths and for tourism planning ¹⁴.

In the Greater Maasai Mara, more than 15,000 landowners receive lease fees from wildlife conservancies, according to the conservancies' association ¹⁵. Our report on a small camp and its community conservancy shows how much of that bargain remains undisclosed.

Hawaiʻi's Green Fee law requires the governor to request general funds approximating the new revenue, to be spent equally on natural resources, disaster resilience and the visitor experience and its impacts ¹⁶. Our analysis of the Green Fee follows what happened to that money.

What regenerative travel is not

It is not offsetting. Paying for trees or carbon credits elsewhere may have value, but it does not change the condition of the place being visited. From 27 September 2026, EU consumer law bans claims "based on the offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions, that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive impact" on emissions ¹².

It is not a label. The same directive bans generic environmental claims that a trader cannot support with recognised excellent environmental performance, and sustainability labels that are not based on a certification scheme or established by public authorities ¹². The tourism scholar Pauline Sheldon has warned that the term "is starting to be used in a way that is not so meaningful", a practice she calls "regenerative washing" ¹¹.

It is not a gesture. Volunteer days and pledges can raise awareness without changing much on the ground. A Nordregio study of the Faroes recommended expanding the islands' 'Closed for Maintenance' volunteer programme, but noted criticism of its scope and effectiveness, and an interviewee's view that its global coverage had brought more visitors ¹⁹.

It is not a finished state. Dredge's description of regeneration as a journey rather than an outcome is a useful corrective to any business or place that claims to have arrived ⁹.

How travellers can tell

No checklist is conclusive, but five questions separate most serious efforts from marketing.

1. What is being restored, and from what baseline? A claim that names a river, a reef or a craft, and the condition it started from, can be checked. "Giving back to nature" cannot.
2. Who decides? Look for evidence that residents, landowners or Indigenous custodians shape the work, not only that they are employed by it.
3. Where does the money go? A visitor fee or a hotel levy is only as regenerative as the spending it funds and the reporting on that spending.
4. Who has verified it? Under the EU's new rules, a certification scheme means third-party verification by a party whose competence and independence are assured ¹². Ask who audited the claim and whether the results are published.
5. Is it about this place? Offsets, global pledges and generic badges say little about the place you are standing in.

Regenera Luxury, with which this publication is affiliated, makes a similar case in its essay on taking regenerative travel from intention to verified impact: without measurement and verification, it argues, the term risks becoming greenwashing ¹⁸. Our five-step scale for reading regeneration claims applies the same logic to destinations, from aspiration to independent verification. The research base is still young, as we set out in what the research can and cannot yet show, and the contrast with older approaches is explored in our explainer on regenerative versus sustainable tourism. For now, the most honest answer to "is this regenerative?" is usually: not yet proven, but here is what to look for.