After exploring “Converging Forces – The Future is Hybrid by Design” in the 2026 Annual Edition, The Hotel Yearbook returns with a newly published Sustainability Edition that moves beyond improvement stories and into something more fundamental: regeneration.
The HOTEL Yearbook 2026 – Sustainability Edition, titled “The Regenerative Question – What Hospitality Must Become,” treats regenerative hospitality not as a trend to follow, but as a serious challenge the sector needs to work through. It brings together a global mix of operators, designers, researchers, and strategists to examine what regeneration looks like in the real world, and what it asks the industry to rethink.
We brought together 25 leaders, operators, designers and researchers from across continents to discuss ‘regeneration in hospitality’. What emerged are eight productive tensions—between theory and practice, growth and limits, measurement and meaning—that hospitality leaders must learn to hol. This edition refuses false consensus, and it does not provide easy answers. Instead, it invites readers into the real work, about what regeneration demands, who we must become, and whether we have the courage to change or will wait to be forced.
Editors-in-Chief Willy Legrand, Carlos Martin-Rios, and Alessandro Inversini
The edition is shaped by a simple starting point: hospitality was once about welcoming people in ways that built trust, strengthened community, and respected place. Over time, the industry professionalized, scaled, and became increasingly driven by growth, often treating communities, ecosystems, and culture as “outside” the business model. In their opening editorial, the editors argue that this has turned hospitality from something naturally regenerative into something often extractive, and that the industry now faces a credibility test: can it shift from taking value to creating it, not just for owners and guests, but for the places that make hospitality possible?
Rather than trying to settle the debate with one definition of “regenerative,” HYB 2026 does something more useful. It maps the tensions that practitioners are already dealing with, including the gap between big ideas and day-to-day operations, the uncomfortable line between “optimizing” today’s systems and truly changing them, and the risk that “regenerative” becomes the next label that sounds good but can’t be proven. It asks how the industry can move forward without watering down the ambition or turning regeneration into marketing.
The result is not a single playbook, but a clearer picture of what regenerative hospitality is (and what it isn’t) built through real arguments, examples, and shared learning. In the end, the question is no longer only how to reduce harm inside a hotel’s walls, but how hospitality can actively support the health of the wider place it depends on.
As the editors write, the regenerative question is not simply what the industry should do next. It is who hospitality chooses to become.
We extend our sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to, sponsored, and supported The HOTEL Yearbook 2026. It is your expertise, time, and confidence in this platform that make it possible to bring together such a wide-ranging set of ideas and viewpoints. This edition is truly a shared accomplishment, shaped by the generosity of thinkers willing to contribute their knowledge for the benefit of the wider industry.
The HOTEL Yearbook 2026 – Sustainability Edition is now available in online and PDF format at www.hotelyearbook.com. Further details about contributors, access options and previous editions can be found via www.hotelyearbook.com/editions/.