Regenerative Hospitality: A New Name for an Older Knowing

Regenerative hospitality begins with a different question. Rather than asking only how we can reduce the impact of a hotel, it asks what that hotel can give back to the land, the people who work there, the culture that surrounds it and the guest who passes through it.

I have been hearing the term regenerative hospitality more frequently, and I find myself drawn to the conversation because, although the language is relatively new, the thinking behind it feels very familiar.

For more than three decades, I have worked across hospitality and wellness in very different cultures and landscapes. What I have learned is that the most meaningful places are not simply beautiful, luxurious or sustainable. They have a relationship with where they are.

For me, regenerative hospitality begins there.

Place Comes First

Every place has a story before a hotel arrives. There is already a landscape, a climate, an ecology, a way of building and eating, local materials, plants, rituals and people who carry knowledge of that place.

At Maroma in the Riviera Maya, we built the spa around the geometry of a flower and conceived the space almost as a monastery. Crystals were placed beneath the structure, watering places were created at ceremonial points, and the movement through the spa considered the rising and setting of the sun.

The gardens were planted with local herbs that became part of the treatment menu. Materials were sourced locally, and the uniforms referenced local fabrics and dress. Traditional massage and ritual were not added later as a layer of “local culture”; they were woven into the experience from the beginning.

Even more importantly, the spa was not separated from the hotel. The same kindness and connection a guest experienced on arrival continued throughout their stay. If the therapists were not busy in the spa, they might find a guest elsewhere in the hotel and simply offer to care for them or massage their feet.

There was no hard line between wellness and hospitality. It was one experience.

That is still one of the clearest expressions of sense of place I have experienced.

People Bring a Place to Life

A hotel can be beautifully designed, but ultimately people are what make it meaningful.

At Four Seasons Hong Kong, I saw this in a completely different cultural context. The team understood the Hong Kong guest deeply. Care was expressed through extraordinary attention to detail, but also through traditions that were meaningful locally.

Something as simple as the foot wash became important because the smallest gesture of care mattered. Treatments were created around the guests themselves while preserving traditions rather than replacing them with an imported idea of wellness.

We also observed 拜神 (baai saan) rituals, making offerings to the local deities associated with the land. These practices reminded us that we were operating within a culture and a place that existed long before the hotel.

For me, this is an important part of regeneration. We cannot create a true sense of place simply through architecture or design. The people working within a hotel need to understand, participate in and feel connected to what is being created.

Nature Is Not Decoration

My work with plants has made this increasingly important to me.

When I created and opened the spa at Inn at Perry Cabin for Orient-Express, the concept began with the herbs growing in the local gardens and the natural world surrounding the property. Those plants influenced not only the treatments but the design and identity of the spa itself.

This is very different from placing an herb garden beside a spa once the concept has already been completed.

Nature can enter much earlier. The plants, climate, landscape, water, seasons and traditional knowledge of a place can help determine what an experience should actually become.

A plant does not exist separately from its environment. It is shaped by its soil, climate, season and relationships. I increasingly believe hospitality works in much the same way.

Wellbeing Is the Outcome

For many years, our industry located wellness primarily inside the spa. Today I think the more interesting question is how the entire hotel makes someone feel.

Wellbeing is affected by how we sleep, the food we eat, the light, the landscape, the pace of the day, our contact with nature and the people who care for us. A wonderful treatment may be part of that experience, but it is only one part.

This is where my worlds of hospitality, wellness and plants have increasingly come together. All three have taught me to look at the whole.

When place, people, nature and culture are considered together, wellbeing becomes an outcome of the experience rather than simply another amenity within it.

Does This Hotel Belong Here?

This is perhaps the question I find most useful when thinking about regenerative hospitality.

Does this hotel belong here?

Does it feel as though it grew from its particular landscape and culture, or could it simply be lifted up and placed somewhere else? Does it preserve knowledge and relationships that already exist? Does it allow local people to become part of its identity? Does its presence contribute something meaningful to the place around it?

Regenerative hospitality does not need to mean adding more experiences, more treatments or more programming. In many cases, I believe it asks us to listen more carefully before we begin creating.

After more than three decades in hospitality and wellness, this is the work that interests me most now: creating places where design, people, nature, culture and wellbeing are considered as one interconnected system.

Perhaps regenerative hospitality is not entirely a new idea after all. Perhaps it is giving us new language for something hospitality has always known at its best: that a truly extraordinary hotel does not simply occupy a destination.

It belongs to it.