What Hospitality Might Become
Yves Carnazzola argues that the real shift facing hospitality is not from sustainability to regeneration as competing trends, but from seeing hospitality as an industry managing impacts to seeing it as a participant in living systems. Regeneration is framed as a reorientation of purpose: from efficiency and control to coherence, shared responsibility, and place vitality, supported by new governance, financing, and accountability structures.
Over the past two decades, hospitality has taken sustainability seriously. Real progress is visible. Environmental impacts are measured, energy use is tracked, emissions are calculated, supply chains are audited, and accountability is embedded in operations. Sustainability is no longer a goal; it is an expectation.
Sustainability emerged as a response to the excesses of mass tourism, where growth long ignored ecological limits, community well-being, and long-term resilience. It gave the industry a shared language for responsibility, along with practical tools to make impacts visible and align business practices with environmental and social concerns.
The Hotel Yearbook 2026 - Sustainability Edition
The HYB 2026 The Regenerative Question: What Hospitality Must Become tackles regenerative hospitality's fundamental tensions. Moving beyond sustainability buzzwords, contributors will explore three perspectives: purists advocating holistic living-systems approaches; realists demanding measurable frameworks for accountability and scalability; and strategists seeking pragmatic balance between transformation and implementation. This edition serves as a critical forum to interrogate the divides, identify synergies, and define actionable pathways forward. By convening industry experts, researchers, and entrepreneurs, we transform contested concepts into constructive dialogue and, ultimately, clarifying what regenerative hospitality authentically is and isn't.