What the research can, and cannot yet, show

How much of what is said about regenerative tourism is backed by evidence? In its first issue, The Regenera Luxury Magazine reviewed the research and sorted it into three groups: what is defined and published, what is still debated, and where the evidence is thin ¹. Its review was written with hotels in mind. This analysis reads the same literature from the side of destinations, starting with the evidence that matters most to them and is most often overstated: what travellers actually do.

The say–do gap

Surveys repeatedly find that travellers care about sustainability. In Booking.com’s 2026 survey, 85% of travellers said more sustainable travel was important to them ¹⁴, while 37% did not trust that options labelled as sustainable really are ⁴. Stated concern is not behaviour. In a qualitative study published in Annals of Tourism Research in 2014, Emil Juvan and Sara Dolnicar found that environmental activists, well aware that tourism harms the environment, still took holidays with negative environmental effects and explained them away rather than changing how they travelled ². The explanations fell into three groups: denial of consequences, of responsibility and of control ³. If committed environmentalists behave this way, survey percentages are a weak basis for predicting how visitors will behave in a destination.

Behavioural data are scarcer, and what exists is mostly a proxy. Booking.com reports that travellers booked 100 million room nights in 2025 at properties with third-party sustainability certification ⁴. That records a choice of accommodation, not what happened to the places concerned. For destinations, the practical lesson is that rules, prices and infrastructure, such as fees, caps, transport and zoning, tend to carry more weight than appeals to good intentions. Our analyses of Bhutan’s visitor fee and Copenhagen’s CopenPay look at each approach in turn.

Defined and published

Some foundations exist. The Magazine cites the definition of regenerative luxury used by the Regenera Luxury Standard, which is its publisher’s own ¹. The most widely cited independent framework is by Loretta Bellato, Niki Frantzeskaki and Christian Nygaard, published online in Tourism Geographies in 2022 and in print in 2023. Built from practitioner consultations and a review of theory and practice, it sets out five design dimensions and seven practice principles, and draws on Indigenous knowledge alongside Western science ¹⁵. A companion paper in the Journal of Tourism Futures in 2022 combined a scoping review, practitioner consultation and case studies to describe tourism as a living system with five interdependent stakeholder roles ⁶.

There are also data, though not on regeneration as such. A 2013 Cornell study by Howard Chong and Rohit Verma compared more than 3,000 eco-certified hotels with about 6,000 others and found that certification left revenue neither higher nor lower on average ¹¹². The Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index 2025 covers energy, water and carbon data from 27,219 hotels for 2023 ¹¹¹.

Still debated

Much remains contested. Bellato and Pollock (2025) describe regenerative tourism as a “nascent, often misunderstood concept” ¹. Dianne Dredge’s 2022 viewpoint in the Journal of Tourism Futures argues that regeneration requires changes in mindset, systems and practice, and that scientific and strategic management, including sustainability criteria and certification, is not enough on its own for complex problems; tourism, she writes, “must be managed as a complex adaptive system” ⁷. Becken and Kaur (2022) proposed a values-based approach for New Zealand’s Department of Conservation that asks what value means before trying to measure it ¹.

Recent reviews confirm how unsettled the field is. A 2025 semi-systematic review by Janith Iddawala and Diane Lee in Tourism Planning & Development found the concept still “shrouded in ambiguity”, identified four recurring pillars (community centrism, an ecological worldview, multi-stakeholder collaboration and net positive effects) and noted that research is geographically uneven, with too few studies from developing countries ⁸. The field is also small. A 2024 scientometric study counted 27 documents on regenerative tourism or travel in the Web of Science, against several thousand on sustainable tourism, with about half of the regenerative work appearing in the last years of the period it covered ⁹. Counts depend on databases and search terms; the order of magnitude is the point.

There is a tension running through this literature. Dredge’s critique of management by criteria sits uneasily with the demand for comparable indicators. Destinations need both: a change in what tourism is for, and a way of showing whether it has happened.

Where the evidence is thin

The gap between what is said and what is shown is widest at property level. Studies of regenerative hotels are mostly conceptual or based on interviews; the leading one, by Inversini and colleagues (2024), rests on nineteen semi-structured interviews with academics, consultants and self-described regenerative hoteliers ¹¹⁰. Comparable data are scarce even for conventional metrics: of roughly 9,800 properties that submitted waste data to the 2025 Cornell index, just over 4,500 passed validation ¹¹¹. And the Magazine found little peer-reviewed work that addresses regeneration in ultra-luxury at all ¹.

At destination scale the pattern repeats. Strategies, pledges and plans are abundant; baselines, comparable indicators and independent evaluations are rare. The European Tourism Indicators System offers destinations 43 core indicators, yet a 2022 study found implementation difficult at sub-national level, mainly for lack of available and up-to-date data, and found destinations reluctant to bear the cost of the visitor, resident and business surveys that many indicators require ¹³. What regeneration would mean for a watershed, a reef or a neighbourhood, and over what period, is rarely specified in advance, which makes it hard to demonstrate afterwards.

A proposal, not an assessment

The Magazine also describes how the Regenera Luxury Standard collects evidence, through a framework of nine sections, 51 criteria and about 600 KPIs, independent audits and a two-year certification cycle, and it invites researchers to submit work for its second issue ¹. That framework is its publisher’s own, and Regenera Luxury is affiliated with this publication. It should be read as one proposal for closing the gap rather than an independent assessment of it ¹.

Why it matters for destinations

Three conclusions follow. First, visitors’ stated preferences are a weak foundation for policy; outcomes tend to follow design. Second, the academic case for regenerative tourism is still mostly conceptual, so destinations adopting the term are ahead of the evidence. That is not a reason to wait. It is a reason to set baselines before starting; the Asa Wright Nature Centre in Trinidad shows how slow that work is even for a single protected forest. Third, the measures that matter most to residents, such as local income retained, housing, ecosystem condition and cultural continuity, are the least standardised.

It is why our profiles separate aspiration from documented and verified outcomes, and why many of them end with open questions rather than conclusions.