The Problem With Sustainable Tourism

The sustainable tourism industry has a problem it can’t acknowledge: almost nothing it calls sustainable actually passes a simple structural test. Strip away the certifications, the metrics, the glossy reports with photos of smiling locals. Ask one question: Can this sustainability practice be removed without causing immediate business failure?

If the answer is yes - and for nearly every certified sustainable tourism operation, it is - then what you have isn’t sustainability. It’s performance.

I’ve spent twenty years in this industry. I’ve read the reports, attended the conferences, watched the proliferation of eco-labels and green certifications. And I’ve concluded that most of what passes for sustainable tourism is structurally indistinguishable from the extraction it claims to oppose. The extraction just wears nicer clothes.

This isn’t a moral critique. Many people in sustainable tourism genuinely believe they’re doing good work. The problem is structural, not personal. When sustainability practices are additions to business models rather than the mechanism of business models, they remain vulnerable to removal whenever costs demand. And costs eventually demand.

The Certification Trap

Let’s be specific about what sustainable tourism certifications actually measure.

Green Globe, Rainforest Alliance, EarthCheck, Travelife - there are dozens of these programs now. Each promises to verify that a tourism operation meets environmental and social standards. The logic seems reasonable: travelers can’t evaluate every claim, so trusted third parties do it for them. Operations that meet standards get certified; market forces reward them; industry improves.

But certification measures compliance with defined metrics. Energy consumption. Water use. Waste production. Local hiring percentages. These are real measurements of real things. They’re also almost completely disconnected from whether tourism strengthens or extracts from communities.

A hotel can reduce measured water consumption while building a massive pool complex - pools aren’t in the assessment. A tour company can meet local hiring percentages while paying per-tour rates that create economic dependence without stability. A resort can source food locally by buying from industrial farms that happen to be nearby rather than small producers who would actually benefit.

None of this is fraud. It’s what happens when complex systems get reduced to measurable metrics. People optimize for what gets measured. Improvement in measurements isn’t the same as improvement in underlying reality.

Goodhart's Law When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Originally applied to economics, equally relevant to sustainability metrics - what gets measured gets gamed. applies with full force. The metrics become targets. Once they’re targets, they stop measuring what they were designed to measure.

But there’s a deeper problem than gaming: certification can be removed.

The Sustainability Removal Test

In a research paper I’ve submitted to SSRN - “Existential Sustainability: A Structural Approach to Anti-Extractive Tourism” - I introduce a diagnostic that distinguishes structural sustainability from performance:

Can the sustainability practice be removed without causing immediate business failure?

Apply this test to a certified sustainable hotel. The hotel has solar panels, water recycling, local sourcing commitments, community programs. Remove them. What happens? Electricity costs rise (or fall, depending on current rates). Water bills increase. Supply chains shift. Community goodwill decreases.

The hotel continues operating.

This is performative sustainability Sustainability practices that can be added to or removed from a business model without affecting business survival. The practices are optional additions rather than structural requirements. . The practices are valuable, admirable even. But they’re additions to a business model, not the mechanism of the business model. They can be removed when investor pressure demands cost-cutting. They can be abandoned when a new CEO decides to prioritize growth. They can be quietly scaled back during economic downturns.

And they will be. Not because tourism operators are uniquely cynical, but because that’s how optional practices work in competitive markets. What can be removed eventually gets removed, optimized away by the relentless pressure to reduce costs and increase returns.

Now consider a different structure. A tour operator that retains 72% of gross revenue within local communities through direct partnerships with family-owned businesses. No commissions to middlemen. No corporate hotel chains. No volume discounts extracted from vendors. If that operator tried to reduce local retention to the industry standard of 20-30%, what would happen?

The partner relationships would collapse. The tours couldn’t operate. The business would mechanically fail.

That’s existential sustainability A business structure where removing community benefits would mechanically cause the collapse of the organization. Community benefit isn't a strategic choice but a structural requirement for survival. . The sustainability isn’t an addition - it’s the structure itself. Remove it and there’s no business.

This distinction has predictive power. Operations that fail the Sustainability Removal Test can degrade over time without organizational consequences. The certifications can be dropped, the commitments scaled back, the community programs eliminated. The business continues.

Operations that pass the test cannot degrade without ceasing to exist. The constraints are structural, not voluntary. The sustainability isn’t a choice but a requirement for survival.

Why Certification Programs Can’t Fix This

You might think the solution is better certifications. Stricter standards. More rigorous enforcement. This misunderstands the structural problem.

Certification programs exist to verify compliance with defined criteria. They cannot verify structural integration. No certification can determine whether a business would survive without its sustainability practices, because that determination requires understanding the internal structure of the business model - something external auditors can’t assess.

More fundamentally, certification creates perverse incentives. The certifications become marketing assets. Operations pursue them for competitive advantage rather than genuine commitment. The proliferation of certifications (there are over 140 eco-labels in tourism) creates confusion that bad actors exploit. Travelers can’t evaluate the rigor of different programs, so any certification provides cover.

I’ve visited operations with impressive sustainability credentials that felt extractive in practice - places where the certification was real in the spreadsheet and absent in the experience. I’ve visited uncertified family-run guesthouses that embodied everything sustainable tourism claims to want: genuine connection, mutual benefit, cultural respect, relationships strengthening over time.

The certification couldn’t tell the difference. It’s not designed to. It measures compliance with standards, and compliance with standards isn’t the same thing as structural sustainability.

The Extraction That Continues

The sustainable tourism movement emerged to address extraction - tourism that takes natural beauty, cultural experiences, and local labor, converts them into consumer products, and channels profits elsewhere. Communities provide raw material; corporations capture value.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most “sustainable tourism” continues to extract. It extracts more gently. It extracts with better optics. It extracts while displaying certifications. But the fundamental economic relationship hasn’t changed.

Large sustainable tourism operations remain owned by outside investors expecting returns. They employ locals at wages far below tourist payments. They channel significant profits to distant shareholders. They convert local culture and environment into products for consumption.

The extraction wears a nicer face. It’s still extraction.

I’ve watched the pattern repeat: community-based tourism initiative starts with good intentions. It grows. Outside investors notice. They offer capital for expansion. Community loses control. Operation professionalizes - managers hired from elsewhere. Local ownership becomes minority ownership becomes no ownership. The initiative still calls itself community-based. The community no longer benefits meaningfully.

This happens because the underlying model hasn’t changed. Tourism still operates as extraction. Sustainable tourism operates as gentler extraction. The arrow still points the same direction - from local communities to outside interests. It moves more slowly. But it moves.

What Structural Sustainability Actually Requires

If certification can’t create structural sustainability, what can?

Based on twenty years of operating Culture Discovery Vacations, I can identify specific structural constraints that pass the Sustainability Removal Test - constraints that make extraction mechanically impossible rather than merely discouraged.

Zero commissions. We refuse all payments from vendors for bringing guests. Shops pay us nothing. Restaurants pay us nothing. This sounds small but it’s structural. The commission system creates incentives to steer tourists toward whoever pays the highest kickback rather than whoever offers the best experience. Eliminate commissions and partner selection becomes based purely on quality, relationship potential, and authentic local ownership. Remove this constraint and the entire partner relationship model collapses - we’d have no basis for recommendations, no trust foundation, no differentiation from commission-based operators.

Volume caps. Groups are limited to eighteen guests maximum, operating fourteen weeks per year per location. Maximum of roughly 250 guests annually in any single destination. This prevents partner over-dependence - a cooking instructor hosting twelve to fourteen sessions per season earns meaningful supplemental income (€4,000-€5,000 annually) without becoming economically dependent on tourism. Remove volume caps and partner relationships transform - they’d need to expand capacity, hire staff, professionalize in ways that destroy what made them valuable. The business model requires the caps.

Local ownership requirements. Every partner must be locally owned - no corporate chains, no external investors. This ensures tourism revenue stays within families aligned with preservation values. When a family-owned winery started accepting mass-market tours and demanding commission arrangements, we ended the partnership despite its convenience. Remove this requirement and we’d be indistinguishable from conventional operators steering guests toward the highest bidder.

Fair pricing without bulk discounts. We pay full price to vendors. No negotiating lower rates for guaranteed volume. This creates partners who value the relationship rather than resenting the extraction. They protect the model’s integrity - in one case, a vendor partner reported a guide secretly accepting commissions, allowing us to address a violation we wouldn’t have detected otherwise. Remove fair pricing and partner relationships become adversarial - normal vendor relationships based on cost minimization rather than mutual benefit.

These constraints together produce specific outcomes: approximately 72% of gross revenue retained within local communities (compared to 20-30% industry norm), 100% partner retention over twenty years (excluding retirements and unrelated business sales), 31% guest return rate, 18% net margins despite the high-retention structure.

But the critical feature isn’t the outcomes - it’s that the constraints can’t be removed without business collapse. They’re structural, not additional. The sustainability is existential.

The Civita Warning

The clearest demonstration of structural limits comes from comparing two destinations where we operated: Soriano nel Cimino and Civita di Bagnoregio.

We maintained identical structural constraints in both - volume caps, zero commissions, local ownership requirements. But Civita experienced what Soriano hasn’t: aggregate visitor volume from operators without our constraints.

When we started operating in Civita in 2007, the village had roughly eighteen permanent residents. Minimal tourist presence. The kind of place where genuine cultural exchange was possible.

Then Rick Steves called it his favorite Italian hill town. The Amazing Race filmed there. Japanese tourists discovered Hayao Miyazaki connections. By 2017, annual visitors reached 850,000 in a village measuring 230 meters by 110 meters.

Our 250 annual guests maintained their structural sustainability. But 850,000 aggregate visitors from unconstrained operators transformed the destination completely. Resident population dropped to eleven - but the real change was functional. Original residents sold and departed, replaced by vacation-home investors. Former houses became rentals. Garages became souvenir shops. The last grocery store serving residents closed. Seven B&Bs, five restaurants, multiple bars, shops selling postcards to bus tourists. Zero services for actual residents.

We ceased operations in 2018. The authentic cultural experience we sold no longer existed. Continuing would have required us to profit from the extraction cycle we were founded to prevent.

This reveals the fundamental limitation: individual operator constraints cannot prevent destination-level extraction when unconstrained competitors enter the market. Our structural sustainability protected our partnerships but couldn’t prevent aggregate volume from destroying the destination.

Meanwhile, Soriano - population 8,000, absorbing our 250 guests plus minimal other tourism - remains stable. Same constraints, different scale of external pressure. Population unchanged. Local business ownership above 95%. Full resident infrastructure maintained. Tourism integrates rather than displaces.

The variable wasn’t our behavior. It was identical. The variable was whether the community had demographic mass to absorb aggregate tourism pressure.

The Tourism Area Life Cycle and Its Alternatives

Tourism scholars have documented a predictable pattern called the Tourism Area Life Cycle. A destination gets discovered. Volume grows. Competition drives price pressure. Rising land values attract outside investment. Family businesses sell to corporations or get priced out. The destination becomes a museum of itself. Eventually trends shift, leaving the community economically dependent but culturally gutted.

The industry treats this pattern as inevitable - like gravity for destinations. Rise and fall. That’s just how tourism works.

I don’t think it’s inevitable. I think it’s a consequence of business model design. The Life Cycle progresses because operators optimize for volume without structural constraints. Remove the constraints, and the cycle accelerates. Impose structural limits - volume caps, local ownership requirements, zero commissions - and the cycle can be interrupted.

Soriano nel Cimino has remained in what tourism scholars would call the “exploration” phase for twenty consecutive years. By conventional theory, it should have progressed through “development” into “consolidation” and “stagnation” by now. It hasn’t, because the structural constraints prevent the volume escalation that drives the cycle forward.

This suggests a modification to standard tourism theory: stage progression is contingent on visitor volume exceeding sustainable thresholds, not on time elapsed. Destinations don’t inevitably decline. They decline when the business models operating in them lack structural constraints against volume escalation.

The Civita case demonstrates the inverse. Our structurally sustainable operations couldn’t prevent the Life Cycle from accelerating when unconstrained operators flooded the destination. But that’s precisely the point - the structural model worked; the problem was operating alongside operators without those structures.

Why the Industry Can’t Change

Understanding why sustainable tourism fails requires understanding industry structure.

Tourism is a growth industry. Investment flows to companies that expand. Career advancement goes to executives who increase revenue. Conference presentations celebrate scaling innovations. The entire incentive structure rewards growth.

Structural sustainability requires constraints that limit growth. Volume caps mean turning away bookings. Local ownership requirements mean refusing partnerships with scalable corporate providers. Zero commissions mean accepting lower margins than commission-taking competitors. Fair pricing means higher costs than bulk-discount negotiators.

Every structural constraint that passes the Sustainability Removal Test conflicts with growth imperatives. The industry can’t adopt structural sustainability because structural sustainability requires accepting mathematical limits on scale - and the industry is constitutionally incapable of accepting limits on scale.

This isn’t corruption or bad faith. It’s structural incompatibility. An industry organized around growth cannot embrace constraints that prevent growth. The sustainable tourism movement tries to have it both ways - claiming sustainability while pursuing industrial scale. This contradiction explains why it fails.

Premium pricing partially compensates - we charge €4,500 to €5,000 per person per week, which enables structural sustainability while maintaining profitability. But premium pricing limits addressable market. Most tourists won’t pay premiums. The industry therefore optimizes for volume at lower prices, which requires removing the structural constraints that enable genuine sustainability.

The honest assessment: genuinely sustainable tourism at industrial scale may be impossible. The economics conflict. What works at small scale with constrained operators cannot translate to an industry measured by visitor numbers and revenue growth.

The Question Nobody Asks

What strikes me about sustainable tourism discourse is the question it systematically avoids: Should this particular tourism happen at all?

The assumption is that tourism will occur, and the only question is harm reduction. But some places shouldn’t have tourism. Some communities would benefit from no visitors. Some experiences can’t be commodified without destruction.

The sustainable tourism industry can’t ask this question because industries exist to grow. An industry based on sustainable tourism needs more sustainable tourism - new destinations, new products, new markets. The possibility that less tourism might be better threatens the industry’s existence.

So every new destination gets the sustainable treatment. Remote villages get tourism development plans. Sacred sites get visitor management systems. Traditional practices get packaged as experiences. The industry expands while calling itself sustainable.

Until sustainable tourism can ask “should this happen?” rather than just “how should this happen?”, it remains part of the problem.

What Would Real Change Require?

If I imagine tourism that passes the Sustainability Removal Test at scale, certain features seem necessary.

Destination-level constraints. Individual operator virtue cannot overcome collective action problems. Protecting destinations requires policy coordination - visitor caps enforced at municipal or regional level, local ownership requirements with legal force, commission prohibitions that apply across the industry. Without destination-level policy, any operator’s structural sustainability gets overwhelmed by aggregate volume from unconstrained competitors.

Investment structures aligned with limits. Current tourism investment expects growth returns. Structural sustainability requires investment that accepts steady returns within constrained scale - more like cooperative or community ownership than venture capital. This means different investors with different expectations.

Price signals that reflect real costs. When tourists pay artificially low prices enabled by extraction - cheap flights, cheap hotels, cheap labor - they systematically over-consume destinations. Prices that reflect true costs, including community costs of hosting and environmental costs of transport, would reduce volume while increasing value per visitor.

Acceptance of reduced scale. Genuinely sustainable tourism would be much smaller than current tourism. The sheer volume is unsustainable by any meaningful definition. This has uncomfortable implications for industry employment, destination economies dependent on tourism, and travelers accustomed to accessible global movement.

Is this realistic? The economic pressures point the other direction. Growth imperatives remain. Investment structures haven’t changed. Policy coordination faces collective action problems. The industry will continue calling itself sustainable while sustaining nothing but its own expansion.

But at small scale, with operators willing to accept structural constraints, it works. I know because we’ve operated this way for twenty years. The partners want to continue. The travelers return. The relationships strengthen rather than fray. The Sustainability Removal Test gets passed.

That’s not a solution for the industry. It’s evidence that structural sustainability is possible when operators accept the constraints it requires.

What Tourism Professionals Should Ask

If you work in tourism and are reading this with your own operation in mind, here are the questions that matter:

Could you remove your sustainability practices tomorrow and continue operating? If yes, what you have is marketing, not structure. It might be good marketing. It might reflect genuine values. But it’s vulnerable to removal whenever costs or competitive pressures demand.

Are your community relationships based on contracts or on interdependence? Contracts define obligations. Interdependence means you need each other to survive. The former can be renegotiated. The latter can’t be abandoned without business failure.

Would your business model work at 10x scale? If scaling would require abandoning your constraints, then your sustainability depends on staying small. That’s not a failure - it’s a feature. But it has to be acknowledged rather than denied.

These aren’t comfortable questions. They don’t produce reassuring answers for most operations. But they distinguish structural commitment from performative sustainability in ways that certifications cannot.

The Structural Divide

The tourism industry will continue producing reports about sustainable tourism, launching certification programs, convening conferences on responsible travel. The metrics will improve on paper while extraction continues in practice.

Meanwhile, a small number of operators will build structurally sustainable businesses that pass the Sustainability Removal Test - businesses where the sustainability can’t be removed because it’s not an addition but the structure itself.

These two categories are not on a spectrum. They’re structurally different. Performative sustainability can become more rigorous, but it remains vulnerable to removal. Structural sustainability is either present or absent - the constraints are either built in or they’re not.

The question for anyone in this industry isn’t whether to pursue sustainability - everyone claims to do that. The question is whether the pursuit is structural or performative. Whether the practices could be removed if costs demanded, or whether removing them would collapse the business.

Most operations fail that test. They can acknowledge it or pretend otherwise, but the structural reality remains.

The few that pass the test - that have genuinely embedded community benefit into their business mechanism rather than adding it as a feature - demonstrate what structural sustainability looks like. Small scale. Constrained growth. Relationships over transactions. Limits as features rather than bugs.

That’s not what the sustainable tourism industry is selling. But it’s what sustainability, structurally defined, actually requires.