Why Hospitality must lead the way towards a Regenerative World | By Diane Binder

Going Beyond Sustainability: A New Compact Between Hospitality Professionals And Host Communities

As the world spirals down towards separation, predation, and domination, tourism and hospitality simply cannot maintain the actual course of action, with a traditional model that is outdated, extractive, often colonial, and dangerously romantic. An idea well summarised by Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau CEO Aaron Sala: “It asked communities to perform authenticity while their futures were auctioned off for occupancy. It celebrated arrivals while silencing the voices of those displaced by rising rents and eroding shorelines”. At a time of deep uncertainty and overshoot, with six of the nine planetary boundaries transgressed, geopolitical instability, and mounting inequality worldwide, the industry needs to go beyond Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices. Giving back a percentage of the company’s income for good causes while damaging local ecosystems or jeopardising lives with unfair working conditions won’t solve it alone—the time of green superficiality, where minimizing harm and reducing negative externalities, is over. What is required now is a new compact between hospitality professionals and host communities, that will radically change the course of action. Hospitality is invited to fully embrace regenerative principles and follow those practitioners, authors and changemakers already embracing systemic practices for positive change and transformation, benefiting our lives, our health, and our collective economic power.

Hospitality’s Unique Potential For Connection

If harnessed properly, hospitality has the potential to tackle many of the world's challenges, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals. In developing countries where tourism serves as a vital source of income and foreign exchange, hospitality stimulates local economies, generates high-quality jobs and fosters entrepreneurship.

Approaching hospitality through a regenerative lens unleashes its interconnected potential at the nexus of many industries. It relies on local food sourcing, influencing agriculture and food systems with the opportunity to shift demand towards regenerative agriculture and agroecology. In construction and real estate, hotels, lodges, and resorts shape land use, material demand, and energy systems, with the potential to support bioclimatic design, local materials and green infrastructure. Energy efficiency, renewable energy adoption, and water management are essential for regenerative hospitality operations, affecting the energy and utilities sector. Guest travel, a significant part of hospitality's carbon footprint, can promote low-carbon transport, local mobility systems, and slow tourism models, impacting mobility and transport. Hospitality generates substantial food, water, and material waste, making it a potential laboratory for circular practices like composting, reuse, and zero-waste systems, influencing waste management and the circular economy.

Regenerative hospitality can also curate and amplify cultural narratives, supporting intangible heritage, arts, and local identity in the culture and creative industries sector. It can integrate mental, physical, and planetary health, offering retreats and healing experiences in the health and well-being sector. Additionally, it can serve as immersive learning labs for regenerative living, training staff, guests, and local communities in education and capacity building.

Hospitality’s Unique Potential For Transformation

Hospitality holds the unique capacity to transform people at their most open and receptive moments—when they step away from routine and immerse themselves in unfamiliar environments. In doing so, it offers the possibility of deep metamorphosis. It creates sanctuaries for relational, mental, and emotional reconnection, opening space for introspection, silence, and sensory alignment with nature, others, and oneself.

Through authentic cultural encounters, natural rhythms, and embodied experiences, guests rediscover their ties to human relationships, land, time, and meaning. Travel gently disrupts assumptions; it challenges dominant worldviews and sows seeds of empathy, humility, and curiosity. Unlike abstract messages about sustainability, regenerative hospitality makes new values tangible through places, tastes, textures, and rituals, allowing people to feel and embody regeneration. These profound experiences don’t end with the stay—they often inspire enduring shifts in behavior, influencing how guests eat, live, and consume, and create ripple effects that extend far beyond their journey. Hospitality can be a portal of human transformation.

When rooted in regenerative principles, it shifts mindsets and reshapes relationships to self, others and the planet. It is not just a service industry but a school of life and a quiet force for regeneration.

Defining Regenerative Hospitality

Regenerative organisations have a crucial role to play in this paradigm shift precisely because they support win-win-win solutions, systemic health, and collaborative networks.Niels de Fraguier & Stephen Vasconcellos

Inspired by the Compass for Regenerative Business, regenerative hospitality considers the 5 core principles of regeneration and equity. With purpose at its core, it responds to key social and environmental challenges by providing transformational approaches to pressing challenges. Considering its impact on nature, regenerative hospitality supports the regeneration of natural ecosystems, is inspired by nature cycles, and does not waste. Leveraging people’s diversity for impact, it empowers individuals to bring their creativity, curiosity, and complementary skills to create new opportunities. Recognising its partner’s key role, regenerative hospitality redistributes value for all while ensuring transparency in its operations. Last but not least, it roots its presence in place by recognising every place’s uniqueness, honoring its culture, languages, and biodiversity.

In summary, regenerative hospitality actively seeks to enhance the well-being of travellers and local communities engaged in tourism. It acts intentionally as a catalyst for place-based economic development, cultural preservation, and environmental stewardship. The approach can therefore be summarised in four guiding principles empowering hospitality practitioners, investors, and policymakers to shape a regenerative and equitable future for all:

Shifting Mindsets: Regenerative hospitality begins with a mindset rooted in authenticity and mutual flourishing, transforming travel into a net-positive force for people, place and planet.

Living Systems Thinking: Regenerative hospitality embraces the interconnectedness of all actors and ecosystems, designing strategies that consider ripple effects and foster ecosystems’ vitality.

Place-Based Wisdom and Purpose: Regenerative hospitality honors local heritage, indigenous wisdom and community purpose, rooted in the unique identity and vocation of each place.

Ecosystems of Cooperation: Regenerative hospitality thrives through cross-sector partnerships and shared value creation, elevating communities as co-creators and catalyzing long-term, self-sustaining impact.

Regenerative Hospitality In Action

Today, many hotels, travel agencies and destination management companies claim to support conservation, community engagement, and cultural preservation. While this reflects a positive shift from extractive mass tourism, few actors genuinely apply regenerative hospitality principles throughout their intent, process and implementation.

700'000 heures Impact is one of the few pioneers, as it was created out of those very principles. Evolving from the initial concept of 700'000 heures, founded by visionary hotelier Thierry Teyssier as a series of exclusive stays in temporary destinations, the initiative is now grounded in regenerative values. 700'000 heures Impact pilot project in Tizkmoudine, Morocco, launched in early 2023, demonstrates how regenerative micro-hospitality can catalyze both community and ecological renewal. Initiated by an American NGO and the local community, and funded by Cambon Partners’ endowment fund, the project restored a dozen houses in a stunning but neglected oasis. Bookings are capped at 40 per year to minimize environmental and social disruption, while a regeneration program was co-created with the local community to focus on soil restoration, cultural heritage, and income generation.

Multiple cooperatives have emerged, spanning weaving, carpentry, poultry farming, food processing and community service in heritage and education, creating over 110 jobs mostly for women. These are moving toward self-sufficiency through market linkages. The project extends far beyond hospitality, unlocking local potential and fostering long-term community empowerment.

Other initiatives echo this regenerative vision.

In Brazil’s former gold-rush region, Reserva de Ibicipoca combines eco-lodge, sculpture park and wildlife reserve. Founded by Brazilian businessman Renato Machado, it protects land bordering a state park and contributes to restoring Brazil’s natural heritage.

In Mexico’s cloudforest, tech entrepreneur Ezequiel Ayarza purchased 800 ha to preserve the land and create a haven for both local communities and travellers, Pueblo del Sol. The property now includes a retreat center, a lodge, coffee and vanilla plantations as well as carpentry and ceramics workshops.

In France, Pauseto Estate, a 16th-century hamlet in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence is being restored by Belgian hotelier Benoit Gersdorff into a regenerative hospitality destination opening in 2026. Using traditional building methods and agroecology, the project aims to regenerate soil and produce natural ingredients for food, scent and wellness markets, while offering a space for reconnection and learning.

Tourists As Guardians Of The Future Of Places

Hospitality leaders are called to lead with audacity, boldness and responsibility towards a new moonshot, tapping into the sector’s potential to foster regeneration and equity. What if tourists could become guardians of the future of places, experiences, and cultures? What if pioneers could join forces to walk off the beaten track of emerging practices shaping the sector’s future?

With this objective in mind, the École Hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) is launching its first Open Innovation Summit on May 20-21, 2025. It serves as a platform, a movement, and a call to action for the hospitality industry as a whole to embrace a new mindset serving the common good. By reconciling the multidimensional perspectives of value creation, the summit will be an avenue inviting all leaders wanting to onboard on the great ReGeneration.

The opportunity is for you to join us to reflect and co-create the path towards more robust organisations designing systems where success is not measured by the number of arrivals but by shared prosperity and flourishing places. By adopting a regenerative approach, the hospitality industry can not only mitigate harm but actively contribute to the well-being of communities, ecosystems, and cultures, by becoming a force for cultural stewardship, economic innovation and geopolitical fluency; by becoming a force for good, contributing to birthing a thriving future for all. The time is now.