Regenerative Tourism: 5 Things To Think About
A dark week for the climate fight this week as we go into another Trump term, but on Wednesday, it felt good to be amongst fellow sustainable souls, at the Regenerative Tourism Conference, held during World Travel Market (WTM) London along with experts from Conscious Travel , Bloomberg Green and The Tourism Space® .
Iceland is a sustainable travel destination but will it suffer from overtourism?
While there was optimism, pessimism and plenty of insights, this is what I took away from the conference, along with a determination that these intiatives find ways to succeed.
Regenerative Tourism: 5 Things To Think About
Regenerative tourism is about more than just conservation and keeping the status quo. It’s about helping a destination to flourish and the list of KPIs for this from Anna Pollock was brilliant - including helping places to self-organise, encouraging a web of life, promoting adaptability and resilience, championing zero waste projects and many more, echoing nature’s systems.
Regenerative tourism registers less in terms of searches than Moo Deng at only just under 1,000 articles this year to date. Incredible, slightly frustrating stats from Bloombery which highlight the scale of where we are but also the size of the opportunity to come. Sustainable tourism as a phrase fairs a lot better but it’s fair to say neither are really registering against mainstream tourism searches as over 2 billion of us look to get away each year.
As well as being regenerative, tourism projects, big and small, need to rethink what success looks like and champion guest quality over quantity, have a strong sense of place and ensure the residential community are clear stakeholders in rethinking how to make destinations culturally rich all year round.
Local. Don’t overlook the local. Smaller horizons, championing local destinations, local visitors and authentic, exciting local projects will be vital to offer up alternatives to the far-flung, the exotic and the global.
We need a wholesale paradigm shift in our systems thinking. We aren’t cogs in a machine system that’s dead. We are part of a living system, we are nature, we are interconnected to everything, affected by everything and our tourism strategies need to reflect this. Nature isn’t a destination, it’s our reality.