Lipstick on Legacy: Aradhana Khowala on What Regeneration Really Means

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Dr Aradhana Khowala, CEO of Aptamind Partners and one of the most quoted voices in regenerative tourism. An EHL alumna who has advised more than eighty-five governments and worked on giga-projects such as NEOM and Red Sea Global, Khowala spent the conversation puncturing the comfortable language the industry uses about sustainability. She talks in sharp lines, and most of them landed. The full conversation is available to watch below.

Sustainability is the floor, regeneration the ceiling

Khowala draws a hard line between sustainability and regeneration. Sustainability, she said, is the floor and regeneration the ceiling, and the two barely play the same sport. Sustainability is defeatist by nature, a matter of damage control. Regeneration is a systemic redesign, what she called the audacity of hope. Her image was blunt: if a patient is dying, you do not try to sustain them, you try to bring them back.

What frustrates her is how much of the old model survives behind the new vocabulary. The sector is good at innovation theatre, she said, where the language changes but nothing shifts on the ground. Her phrase for it is lipstick on legacy. Tourism takes a noun and keeps adding adjectives, rural, sustainable, astro, and now regenerative, without anything fundamental changing.

So she asks for specifics. Do not tell her you use local suppliers, she said, that is passé. Tell her that forty percent of your food and drink comes from producers within fifty kilometres, and name them. Do not tell her you planted a million trees, which is good for a brochure. Tell her how many hectares of degraded land you restored against a stated target, and invite her to come and see the site. Ninety percent recycled towels, she added, is not regeneration. It is laundry management.

What the giga-projects taught her

Having worked at the largest scale in the business, Khowala offered a few hard-won lessons. The first is restraint. Just because you can build something does not mean you should, especially with nature as the shareholder. The industry is easily seduced by engineering spectacle, a ski slope in the desert or an underwater palace, and she pushes people to ask whether those are billion-dollar headlines or real value for people and habitats. Treat nature as a problem to engineer around and you have it backwards. Nature is not a bug in the system, she said, it is the system.

She is just as sceptical of the year-round ambition attached to many big projects. Selling a twelve-month destination in a place that regularly hits fifty or fifty-five degrees is not wisdom, in her words, it is denial with air conditioning. There is nothing wrong with a magnificent seven-month destination, and choosing that is the wiser long-term strategy.

Her last lesson is about who is in the room. On big projects especially, she said, you have to surround yourself on purpose with people who disagree with you. If the vision is never challenged by the people around you, reality will challenge it later, and by then you are already in a bubble.

What people remember

One of her sharpest points was about what makes a destination, and it is not the skyline. Infrastructure is fine, she said, but what makes or breaks a place is reliability at scale. People do not remember how many magazine covers you made or how many architectural awards you won. They remember how you made them feel on a random Wednesday afternoon at one o'clock.

She listed the moments that matter: a cancelled flight, a young family that has lost its stroller, a queue in the heat, a taxi driver who does not speak your language, getting lost. How a destination looks after you when things go wrong is what makes a guest fall in love and come back, and falling for a skyline is overrated. That emotional architecture, as she put it, only happens through locals, through local talent, community and ownership.

Measuring what matters

Khowala sits on the board of a major listed real estate company, so Simone asked where the money is moving. She is optimistic. Real estate used to be measured in yield per square foot, she said, and now the smart money talks about yield for society, about affordable housing, mixed-use buildings, education, community and childcare. Social infrastructure has moved from a fringe concern to an investment thesis, partly because nobody wants a luxury bubble inside a crumbling community, and partly because everything is connected.

Hospitality, she thinks, still measures the wrong things. Political cycles reward growth and volume, so the industry leans on ADR, occupancy and millions of arrivals, which she calls vanity metrics. The numbers that matter are different: how much of a visitor's spending keeps circulating in the destination, the quality of the jobs created rather than just the count, and a net promoter score for the local community rather than only for guests. Unless locals believe tourism works for them, she said, they will never buy into the story, and the visitor who came to taste something authentic ends up paying for a place that has lost its soul. Underneath all of it is a rule she likes: doing well needs being well, for a person and a community alike.

Don't become half human

On the HumanX theme, Khowala could not have agreed more, and thinks it has never mattered more. She has sat in too many boardrooms full of people who are demotivated, distracted and disconnected, the quiet quitters, and found herself wondering what all of it is being built for. In hospitality it is sharper still. If your employees do not feel looked after, she said, they are just a machine wrapped in beautiful paper, and the soul is the whole point.

She ended on something personal. With all the travel, and the rooms where the big decisions get made, what she guards most is not becoming unbearable as she grows more successful, and holding on to the things that keep a person human: getting excited by good music or art, a child laughing, a good joke, good food, time for lunch with friends and family. Lose those, she said, and you are only half human.