Hawaiʻi`s regenerative travel movement: Is this the future of tourism? 🌴⛵☀️
The rules of travel are being rewritten
“Tell your travelers that whenever Hawaiians run out of the ocean, they should run, fast, into the water,” my schoolmate wrote by email. “Tiger sharks love white meat.”
It was 2006. I had just landed my first contract to write a guidebook to Kauaʻi. For several months, my notebook and I cruised down narrow waterfall-lined roads seeking out hidden hideaways and hole-in-the-wall eateries. The island resembles the tropics of your imagination: greenery hangs from road signs, plumeria scents the thick air, and rainbows arc over the clear blue Pacific.
That’s when my grad school colleague, a native Hawaiian from Kauaʻi, responded to my email request for “insider tips” on Hawaiʻi treasures with his advice on how to feed the sharks. He proceeded to inveigh against tourism as little more than an extension of Western colonialism. Never, he instructed me, disclose any secret or sacred locations—or, really, write about his island at all.
To him, like most everyone involved in Hawaiʻi’s travel industry, I was another Mainlander capitalizing off of the Aloha State`s tropical allure.
His sentiment wasn’t unusual on the wonderland of Kauaʻi. Many of the almost 80,000 local residents are frustrated by the crush of visitors who crowd the island each year. And for good reason.
The more people I interviewed about tourism to the archipelago, the more I heard the same message: Don’t come.
And so I altered my first book, Explorer’s Guide: Great Destinations Kauaʻi, and evolved it into one of the early guidebooks highlighting the impact of tourists’ climate footprint on a fragile ecosystem. In my idealism, I thought telling readers to support locally-owned small businesses, to only visit off-the-beaten-path locations with a local guide, and to avoid sacred destinations altogether, would help preserve the local wonders. And yet, even back then, as best I could tell, while the Lonely Planet effect had opened the world to us all and made us into more open-minded humans, it had also infused us with the mistaken idea that every place could (and wanted to) absorb our presence.
Though I envisioned showing people Hawaiʻi not as Disneyland or Daytona Beach, but as an ancient culture and ecosystem worth respecting, the “conscious tourist” perspective I promoted through my book didn’t take hold. Instead, overtourism exploded. Guidebooks that sold much better than mine told Instagram influencers in wide-brimmed hats to sneak onto private land for iconic snapshots, revealing the locations of secret waterfalls to their millions of followers.
Locals argue that travelers, even those supposedly practicing “sustainable tourism,” are leaving destinations worse than when they arrive—the opposite of sustainability. Unchecked so-called “eco-tourism” has damaged fragile ecosystems with erosion, coral bleaching, trashed beaches, and overflowing landfills. Meanwhile, a housing crisis has forced many Native Hawaiians to choose between working multiple jobs and living in overcrowded homes or abandoning their ancestral lands to relocate to Las Vegas or Oregon. Residents are being forced to watch as tourists trash their sacred ancestral spaces, clog roads, and jam up beaches on the weekends—the only time many locals have off to spend with their families.
As Hawaiʻi has gone, so has the world. In some cities, more than 20 visitors arrive for every inhabitant. Barcelona, Amsterdam, Florence, Venice, Prague, Thailand’s Phi Phi Islands, Portugal, Iceland, and others have seen protests or government closures over the crush of visitors making neighborhoods unliveable, degrading nature, and displacing residents. “This isn’t tourism,” reads one protest banner in Barcelona, “it’s an invasion.” It’s also ravaging the climate: The global tourism sector is now responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gasses, almost rivaling that of agriculture.
And it’s only projected to get worse. There are already 1 billion global tourism arrivals annually, and roughly 43 million additional international tourists are expected to join the pool each year. With more residents of middle-income countries from China to India to Brazil gaining the means to travel abroad, the resistance to the tourism status quo is likely to grow as well.
One response to the crush of tourism has been to yank up the welcome mat. The Dutch Tourist Board has stopped promoting Amsterdam. In Prague, authorities are pushing visitors to leave for other towns.
But, in Hawaiʻi, another kind of response is brewing: regenerative travel. And proponents want you to believe you’ll never holiday the same way again.
What is regenerative travel?
Regenerative travel is a nascent movement within the wider $9.5 trillion annual global tourism industry.
Today, the emerging consensus is that regenerative travel should enrich the local ecology, people, and culture of a destination, rather than degrade them. It should also mitigate the climate impacts it takes to get tourists to a place.
Speaking on the future of travel, the marketing firm Wunderman Thompson wrote in 2018: “Doing less harm is no longer enough. The future of sustainability lies in regeneration: seeking to restore and replenish what we have lost.”
At its core, regenerative travel is the simple idea that tourism should leave a place better than it was before. It’s an application of the regenerative design and development theory to global travel.
Regenerative design and development itself is an approach promoted by the influential architect Bill Reed and his company Regenesis Group asserting that best development practices should improve a place, rather than simply preserve it.
Although not formally coined by Reed until 1995, “regenerative design” has deep roots.
The concept is a repackaging of the stewardship methodology and principles indigenous people have used to take care of their environments for millennia. Indigenous people have and still do use what are now recognized as regenerative agriculture principles when tending to soil, ensuring that it supports crops for future harvests and future generations.
Planting the seed: From regenerative development to regenerative travel
A year before I cruised down the waterfall-lined roads of Hawaiʻi to write my guidebook, across the Pacific Ocean, a husband and wife duo, Sandra Kahn and David Leventhal, had just closed on a plot of land—a pristine stretch of beach in Mexico.
It was 2005. Curious about how to best shepherd this new property, Kahn set out for the Greenbuild Conference in Atlanta. It was here that she came across Bill Reed’s concept of regenerative development and design.
Drawing on the regenerative ethos, Khan and Leventhal took the local history, culture, and geography into consideration when crafting a set of parameters for their new resort—Playa Viva. The intention was for the property to enrich not only the local ecology but the local community, too. This would look like improving the education, health, and economic development of their neighbors.
The parameters set forth at Playa Viva would then go on to inform the ethos underpinning Leventhal’s next endeavor, Regenerative Travel, a consultancy and online network of certified and curated luxury regenerative travel destinations he co-founded in 2019.
Alongside Amanda Ho, a founder of a travel magazine and creative agency, Leventhal worked to adapt the regenerative design principles applied to Playa Viva to educate and certify other hotel destinations, given their individual contexts.
In 2020, the Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority approached Ho and Leventhal—could they apply their regenerative travel parameters not to just another hotel or set of resorts, but to an entire tourism ecosystem? Maybe a handful of islands, or so.
Translating the principles that made Playa Viva successful as a sole destination into something more usable for other hotels was one thing. Reimagining an entire economy and ecosystem was another.
Can regenerative travel scale?
Around the globe, industry coalitions, local governments, and tourism industry watchdogs are in the early days of working out what exactly it means for tourists to leave a place better than they found it.
If regenerative travel is to be more than another shade of greenwashing, the nascent movement will have to coalesce around a set of standard criteria as to whether or not a tourism strategy meets muster for “regenerative” in the years to come.
For those of us invested in decarbonizing, the challenge of implementing regenerative travel is precisely what makes it so important—and so exciting—because getting it right could have widespread implications.
That’s why Hothouse is taking a look at regenerative travel this month because tourism touches every facet of how we live—how we eat, work, play, and connect across the globe. Some even point to tourism as an ideal space for experimenting with circular economic models.
As we’ll see, regenerative travel is so difficult to implement because tourism itself crosscuts many industries. From airlines to hotels and resorts to national parks to local governments, any successful tourism operation requires cooperation across these many entities. But in economic and ecological terms, anything truly regenerative should close the loop, eliminate waste, and create a net positive impact. Closing the loop becomes exponentially more challenging with every stakeholder added to the equation.
This level of systemwide cooperation will be messy and challenging, and we’ll need successful examples of it to lead the way. This is what makes understanding what is unfolding in Hawaiʻi today and shaping the conversation around regenerative travel in these early days so important—to ensure it is not another empty catchphrase or passing trend.
Coming up…
In the next dispatch, Hothouse will explore the approach Hawaiʻi is taking to regenerative travel, including who gets to set the parameters and expectations around what it looks like to rejuvenate the Aloha State, who gets to reap the benefits, and what a physical infrastructure to support regenerative travel looks like.
Hawaiʻi is at the forefront of spearheading regenerative travel practices and is one of the only tourism destinations in the process of not just laying out regenerative travel guidelines for its tourism industry but taking a holistic approach to overhauling an entire economy.
Regenerative travel isn’t a fully-fledged climate solution yet, but the movement shows promise. It’s up to us to help shape its trajectory.
Stay tuned for Part Two to get an in-depth look at how this is playing out in Hawaiʻi.
Michele Bigley has written about regenerative travel for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Sierra, Toronto Star, and more. She is writing a book about parents facing climate angst with action. Follow her work by subscribing to her Substack.
Additional writing contributed to this piece by Cadence Bambenek and supplementary editing contributed by Peter Witzig.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled Kahn’s last name upon second reference. It has since been updated.
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Fantastic article, and absolutely the way to go. Tourists have to pay to make the places they visit better not worse. As the article explains, this has to happen by design (and cooperation) among tourism operators.
I think these types of schemes are needed to point us towards less extractive models which better benefit the host cities, however, as you point out - they are more complex in practice than on paper. Look forward to your next piece about how this now works on the ground. I think the best way to truly find models which work is through understanding the context and implementing