The Luxury We Are Leaving Behind

In the late 1990s, early in my career, I spent time around a handful of hotels in South-East Asia that seemed to be playing a different game. Properties such as those of Six Senses and Banyan Tree treated the forest, the reef and the village not as a backdrop to the guest experience but as part of it. I had come from models — in parts of Spain and the Caribbean — where the place was, above all, a setting to be consumed. The contrast stayed with me for twenty-five years. It is, in a sense, the question I have been working on ever since.

That question is simple to state and difficult to answer: when a guest leaves an exceptional hotel, what has the hotel left behind?

What luxury has always measured

Luxury hospitality is extraordinarily good at measuring one thing: the quality of the experience delivered. We audit the thread count and the response time, the temperature of the consommé and the warmth of the greeting. Mystery-shopper programmes, brand standards and guest-satisfaction scores have made the experience ledger one of the most precisely kept in any industry.

That precision is an achievement, and nothing in what follows argues against it. The guest who travels to a remote valley or an island deserves the highest craft. But the experience ledger is, by design, written in the present tense. It tells us almost nothing about the landscape, the culture or the community once the season ends — or about what the hotel will be worth, materially and otherwise, to the next generation.

Sustainability is the baseline

For two decades the industry’s answer to that gap has been sustainability: consume less water and energy, reduce waste, avoid harm. Programmes aligned with the GSTC criteria, ISO 21401, Green Globe, Green Key, LEED and others have done essential work. They made responsible practice auditable, gave owners a common language and moved thousands of properties forward. Regeneration does not replace that foundation. It builds on it.

But a baseline is not a definition of excellence. Reducing harm is necessary; it is not, by itself, a contribution. A hotel that halves its water consumption in a stressed watershed has done something important. It has not yet asked whether the watershed is healthier because the hotel is there.

Regeneration asks a different question

When I am asked to explain the difference in a sentence, I say: not only reduce, but improve. Regeneration shifts the question from “how much damage did we avoid?” to “what is measurably better because we operate here?” — soil, water and biodiversity, but equally livelihoods, living heritage, the skills of the people who work in the hotel and the identity of the place itself.

This is why I find it useful to think of every stay as writing three ledgers. The first records the experience. The second records what remains in the place after the guest has gone. The third records what continues over time: the resilience of the asset, the capability of the team, the trust of the destination. Luxury has been fluent in the first. Its future depends on becoming equally fluent in the other two.

The problem is evidence

Regeneration is easy to claim and hard to prove. The word is already appearing in brand copy faster than the data behind it, and the risk is obvious: a new generation of claims that cannot be substantiated — what I describe in forthcoming research as regeneration-washing. If regenerative luxury becomes a label rather than a discipline, it will lose its meaning before it has had the chance to change anything.

Evidence is also harder than it looks because places are not interchangeable. The same indicator is not the same reference, or the same benchmark, in one part of the world and another. Water use in a desert retreat, a rainforest lodge and an Alpine chalet cannot be read against a single global threshold. A credible approach has to combine common principles with context: measurement designed for the place, continuous rather than occasional, and verified by someone other than the operator making the claim.

Why luxury — and why the smallest properties

It is reasonable to ask why this conversation should start with luxury at all. My answer is that luxury properties hold three unusual advantages: margin to invest in the long term, guests who are willing to participate rather than merely consume, and a storytelling power that shapes what the rest of the industry aspires to. Used well, those advantages make luxury a place to prove what is possible.

The properties that carry the greatest responsibility, however, are often the smallest: independent lodges and retreats in fragile, remote places, run by owners who know their landscape intimately and have little access to the frameworks, consultants and reporting systems built for large groups. Any serious definition of regenerative luxury has to work for them first. If it only works for portfolios, it is not regeneration; it is reporting.

What would change

For operators, it would mean managing the second and third ledgers with the same rigour as the first — with owners, budgets and targets, not intentions. For owners and investors, it would mean recognising that resilience, licence to operate, team continuity and destination trust are not soft benefits but conditions of long-term value, and deserve to be measured with the same care as RevPAR. For guests, it would mean that the word “regenerative” on a website is backed by something they can check.

None of this requires luxury to become austere. The most memorable experiences I have encountered were inseparable from the vitality of the places that hosted them. The finest hotels have always sold a sense of place. The question is whether they will also help keep that place alive.

I often end conversations with hotel owners with the simplest question I know: if you closed tomorrow, what would remain? The answer is the luxury we are leaving behind. It is also, I believe, the clearest measure of what luxury will mean in the decades ahead.