The Regenerative Question - Who We Choose to Become
At its root, hospitality means something simple: to receive a stranger with generosity, to share what you have—food, shelter, warmth, knowledge—and in doing so, strengthen bonds of trust and reciprocity. It creates mutually rewarding relationships between humans and towards the place; ultimately it fosters conditions for life to flourish, deepens human connection, and leaves all parties enriched.
It is also how hospitality functioned across cultures for millennia (see Kevin D. O’Gorman’s “The Origins of Hospitality and Tourism”). The host and guest participated in an exchange that honoured place, community, and the future. Food was shared, stories were exchanged and relationships deepened. The stranger became part of the story of the place.
Somewhere, hospitality became something else. The industry professionalized and capital consolidated. Growth became the organising logic and guests became transactions. Staff became labour costs and places became products to be extracted and monetized. What was once fundamentally regenerative became fundamentally extractive. Regeneration and unlimited growth are contradictory. We now have a reckoning with the 20th-century aberration of the hospitality-as-extraction model that offers a dead-end. It is a fundamental reckoning with what hospitality has become and what it must be to remain legitimate.
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.