What Existential Sustainability Means

The tourism industry has a sustainability problem, but it’s not the one most people think about. The problem isn’t that operators don’t care about communities. Many do. The problem is that caring isn’t structurally required.

A hotel can install solar panels, earn a green certification, and market itself as sustainable. If electricity costs rise, those panels can come down. The hotel keeps operating. A tour operator can partner with local guides, source ingredients locally, and donate to community projects. If margins tighten, those practices can be scaled back. The business survives. This is what I call 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. - sustainability that exists as long as it’s convenient, profitable, or good for marketing.

What happens when sustainability isn’t an addition to a business model, but the mechanism of the model itself?

This question led me to develop a framework I call existential sustainability A business structure where removing community benefits would mechanically cause the collapse of the organization. Unlike CSR or certification approaches, it treats community benefit as a structural necessity rather than a strategic choice. . The formal version appears in a research paper I’ve submitted to SSRN - “Existential Sustainability: A Structural Approach to Anti-Extractive Tourism”. But the framework didn’t emerge from academic theory. It emerged from 20 years of running a tour company and watching what happened when we built the business differently.

The Sustainability Removal Test

Here’s a simple diagnostic that distinguishes structural sustainability from performative sustainability:

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

Consider a hotel with solar panels. Remove the panels. The hotel continues operating with grid power. Sustainability was an operational choice - valuable, admirable even, but not structurally required.

Now consider 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%, the partner relationships would collapse. The tours couldn’t operate. The business would mechanically fail.

That’s the difference. Performative sustainability is removable. Existential sustainability is not.

This isn’t a moral distinction. I’m not suggesting operators with solar panels are bad and operators with local partnerships are good. I’m suggesting something more structural: models that fail the Sustainability Removal Test can degrade over time without organizational consequences. Models that pass the test cannot degrade without ceasing to exist.

How the Framework Emerged

I didn’t set out to develop a theoretical framework. I set out to answer a practical question: could tourism be structured to strengthen communities rather than extract from them?

In 2006, I founded Culture Discovery Vacations in Soriano nel Cimino, a town of about 8,000 people in central Italy. The business model was simple in concept but demanding in execution. We would work exclusively with locally-owned family businesses. We would pay fair rates - no negotiating bulk discounts. We would refuse all commissions from vendors, so our recommendations would be authentic rather than financially motivated. And we would cap volume at levels the community could absorb without distortion.

What surprised me wasn’t that this model worked. I had hoped it would. What surprised me was how the structural constraints created effects I hadn’t anticipated.

The zero-commission policy changed how partners viewed us. When a shop owner asked what commission we expected for bringing guests, the answer - “You pay us nothing; we choose you because you’re authentic and excellent” - immediately distinguished us from every other operator they’d encountered. Trust built differently when financial kickbacks weren’t distorting the relationship.

The volume cap changed partner behavior. A cooking instructor hosting 12-14 sessions per season at fair rates earns meaningful supplemental income - maybe €4,000-€5,000 annually - without becoming economically dependent on tourism. She maintains her primary livelihood. Tourism integrates into her existing life rather than displacing it. She doesn’t pressure us for more volume because she doesn’t need it to survive.

The local ownership requirement created a selection filter. Businesses oriented toward commission-based tourism self-excluded from our partner network. Family operations focused on craft quality and cultural preservation recognized what we were offering. Over time, this produced a partner base where guests trust recommendations precisely because no financial kickback distorts them.

I started calling this “existential sustainability” because the constraints weren’t things we did in addition to running a business. They were the structure that made the business possible. Remove any of them and the business collapses.

The Structure That Makes Extraction Impossible

Traditional tourism development follows a well-documented pattern. An operator discovers an undervalued destination. Competition drives volume growth. Volume pressure drives price negotiations with local vendors. Rising land values attract outside investment. Family businesses sell to corporations or get priced out. The destination becomes a museum of itself - culturally hollowed, with profits flowing to distant headquarters. Eventually trends shift, leaving the community economically dependent but culturally gutted.

Tourism scholars call this the Tourism Area Life Cycle, first described by R.W. Butler in 1980. The industry treats it as inevitable, like gravity. 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 structural constraints in our model create what I’ve come to think of as a natural moat against this extraction cycle. Here’s how:

Zero commissions eliminate incentive corruption. In conventional tourism, operators choose partners based on kickbacks. A guide takes tourists to Shop A (which pays 20% commission) rather than Shop B (superior products, no commission). Restaurants pay per-head fees for delivered groups. This creates systematic misalignment between guest interests (quality experience) and operator interests (maximum commission revenue). Our refusal to accept any commission payments eliminates this distortion. Partner selection becomes based purely on quality, relationship potential, authentic local ownership, and capacity for genuine cultural exchange.

Volume caps prevent partner over-dependence. Groups are capped at 18 guests maximum, operating 14 weeks per year in any single location. This mathematical ceiling prevents the expansion trap where partners over-invest in tourism capacity, become economically dependent, and then pressure operators for higher volume that eventually exceeds carrying capacity. Our partners can’t become tourism-dependent because the volume constraint makes dependency mathematically impossible.

Local ownership requirements ensure authenticity. Every partner must be locally owned - no corporate chains, no external investors. This ensures tourism revenue stays within families aligned with preservation values, and that the “authentic cultural experiences” guests pay premium prices for are actually authentic rather than commercially staged.

Fair pricing maintains relationship quality. We pay full price to vendors. No bulk discounts. No pressure to lower rates. This seems counterintuitive from a margin perspective, but it creates partners who value the relationship rather than resenting the extraction. They recommend us to other families. They protect the model’s integrity - in one case, a vendor partner reported a guide who was secretly accepting commissions, allowing us to address a violation we wouldn’t have detected otherwise.

The Numbers

I want to be specific about what this structure produces, because vague claims about “community benefit” are part of what makes sustainability discourse so hollow.

Our model retains approximately 72% of gross revenue within local communities. “Local” means the municipality where services are rendered. The breakdown: accommodations (7% of gross, 100% locally-owned apartments), meals (22%, family restaurants and homes with locally-sourced ingredients), other local partners like cooking classes and artisans (28%), local guides and activities (8%), and ground transport with local drivers (7%).

The remaining 28% covers operator overhead - marketing, administration, international transport coordination, insurance. This is what leaves the community.

Compare this to industry norms. UNEP research on sustainable tourism estimates that all-inclusive package tours retain only 20-30% of revenue locally, with 70-80% flowing to airlines, international hotel chains, and tour operators headquartered in tourist-generating countries. Our model inverts that ratio.

Despite the high cost of local retention, net margins are approximately 18% - comparable to the industry average of 15-20%. The model remains profitable because premium pricing (€4,500-€5,000 per person per week) compensates for the structural constraints. Guests pay more because they’re getting something genuinely different.

Partner retention is 100% over 20 years, excluding partners who retired or sold their businesses for reasons unrelated to the partnership. In Soriano, we support 37-38 partner families. Three derive primary income (over 75% of household revenue) from the partnership. Four derive significant income (25-75%). The remaining 30-odd families treat it as supplemental income. This distribution is itself structural - the volume constraint mathematically prevents creating a partner base where most families become tourism-dependent.

Guest return rate is 31%. People come back. They tell friends. The business sustains itself through relationship quality rather than marketing spend.

A Tale of Two Destinations

The clearest evidence for how this structure works - and for its limitations - comes from comparing two destinations where we operated: Soriano nel Cimino and Civita di Bagnoregio.

We operated in Civita from 2007 to 2018, maintaining identical structural constraints - maximum 18 guests per group, roughly 250 guests per year. When we started, the village was quiet. Maybe 18 permanent residents. Minimal tourist presence. The kind of place where you could cook with a family and walk through streets that felt genuinely lived-in.

Then media exposure happened. Rick Steves called it his favorite Italian hill town. The Amazing Race filmed an episode there. Japanese tourists discovered Hayao Miyazaki had drawn inspiration from the village. Visitor volume exploded - not our visitors, but aggregate visitors from operators without our constraints.

By 2017, annual visitors reached 850,000 in a village measuring 230 meters by 110 meters. The resident population had dropped to 11, but that number obscures the real transformation. Original residents had sold and departed, replaced by foreign property owners establishing secondary residences. Former homes became vacation rentals. Garages and workshops became tourist-serving businesses. The last grocery store serving residents closed. Seven B&Bs, five restaurants, multiple bars, souvenir shops selling postcards and magnets to busloads of day-trippers. Zero services for actual residents.

We ceased operations in 2018. Not because Civita wasn’t profitable - it was convenient and marketable. But the “authentic cultural experience” we were selling no longer existed. Continuing operations would have required us to profit from the extraction cycle we were founded to prevent. That’s a structural impossibility under existential sustainability. If the product ceases to exist, the business ceases to operate.

Now consider Soriano, where we’ve operated since 2006 under identical constraints. Same volume cap. Same partnership structure. Same pricing model.

Population remains stable at approximately 8,000. Local business ownership in the hospitality sector remains above 95%. Our partner families have expanded organically - remodeling apartments, adding restaurant seating, developing artisan workshops - while remaining family-owned and operated. The town maintains full resident infrastructure: grocery stores, pharmacies, hardware shops, schools, medical services. Tourism integrates into the community rather than displacing it.

The critical variable wasn’t our behavior - we operated identically in both places. The critical variable was aggregate tourism volume relative to community size. Civita lacked the demographic mass to absorb uncontrolled tourism without displacement. Soriano, with 8,000 residents, can absorb our 250 annual guests (and minimal other tourism) without distortion.

This reveals the most important limitation of existential sustainability at the operator level: individual operator constraints cannot prevent destination-level extraction when unconstrained competitors enter the market. Our volume discipline in Civita protected our partnerships but couldn’t prevent 850,000 aggregate annual visitors from transforming the destination.

Firm-level sustainability is necessary but not sufficient. Destination-level sustainability requires policy coordination that aligns competitive incentives with community protection.

Effects at Multiple Scales

Something I didn’t anticipate when designing this structure: the constraints that protect communities at the destination level also produce benefits at the family level for our partners.

Traditional tourism employment systematically strains families. The industry typically prohibits family members from working together in the same establishment, mandates conflicting schedules and separate departments when they do, and demands weekend work, holiday availability, and extended hours. The divorce rate in hospitality is well-documented.

Our volume constraints create different dynamics. Because operations are limited to 14 weeks per year in Soriano with 250 guests maximum, partner families work together during concentrated seasonal periods while maintaining primary livelihoods outside peak tourism months. A husband and wife might co-host cooking sessions together - 12-14 sessions per season generating €4,000-€5,000 - then return to their farm or workshop for the remainder of the year. Work becomes shared family activity rather than competing obligation.

The premium pricing structure means families generate meaningful income from limited volume rather than requiring intensive hours to achieve financial viability. A cooking instructor hosting one group weekly for 14 weeks earns comparable income to working conventional tourism employment for multiple months - while maintaining flexibility for other activities.

The seasonal concentration creates natural boundaries. No “just one more booking” pressure that gradually consumes family time until tourism dominates household life. Partners report that CDV revenue “adds benefit to our lives” rather than requiring life reorganization around tourism demands.

This is another dimension of what I call stakeholder fusion. The model doesn’t just align operator interests with community interests at the destination level. It structurally integrates work with family cohesion within partner households. The 100% partner retention rate over 20 years likely reflects not just economic satisfaction but quality-of-life benefits that traditional tourism employment structures systematically undermine.

Beyond Stakeholder Management

Conventional business thinking treats community benefit and business profit as separate objectives requiring balance. Stakeholder theory asks: how do we manage competing stakeholder interests? The assumption is that community interests and operator interests are different things that must be negotiated and traded off.

Existential sustainability dissolves this framing. When business structure mechanically links survival to community benefit, there’s nothing to balance. The operator has no interests separable from community interests because community failure equals business failure.

If our local partners collapse, we can’t operate. There’s no alternative vendor network, no corporate-owned infrastructure to fall back on, no commission-based supplier pool to draw from. The 72% local revenue retention isn’t corporate social responsibility that can be reduced during cost pressures. It’s the structural mechanism of the business model.

I’ve started calling this “stakeholder fusion” rather than stakeholder management. The categories merge. Asking “Should we prioritize community or profit?” becomes nonsensical when the structure makes them identical.

This isn’t utopian thinking. It’s practical business design. Premium pricing compensates for structural constraints. Authenticity creates guest satisfaction that drives referrals and returns. Partner stability reduces operational friction and builds institutional knowledge. The model works economically because it works relationally.

Anti-Extractive as a Distinct Category

Sustainable tourism scholarship typically distinguishes conventional tourism (extractive) from sustainable tourism (less extractive through certifications and voluntary practices). This creates a binary: extraction versus mitigation of extraction.

I want to propose a third category: anti-extractive tourism A structurally distinct category of tourism where extraction is mechanically impossible through business design - not merely avoided through voluntary practices or mitigated through certification. .

Anti-extractive models don’t just avoid extraction (negative definition) or add sustainable practices (positive definition). They make extraction mechanically impossible through business structure design.

The Sustainability Removal Test operationalizes this distinction:

Conventional operators fail the test - sustainability is optional, something they can do or not do without business consequences.

Certified-sustainable operators fail the test - certifications can be dropped when costs demand, and the business continues.

Anti-extractive operators pass the test - removing the structural constraints would cause immediate operational collapse.

This creates a taxonomy with predictive power. Models that fail the test can degrade over time. Models that pass cannot degrade without mechanically failing as businesses.

What This Means for the Tourism Industry

If you’re a tourism professional reading this, you might be wondering whether this framework applies to your situation. I want to be honest about the boundary conditions.

The model requires destinations that haven’t been hollowed out by mass tourism. Where commission-based networks are entrenched, where family businesses have been displaced by corporate providers, where partner economic models assume referral payments - conversion to existential sustainability becomes extremely difficult. The model works best in destinations still possessing authentic community fabric.

The model requires cultural alignment, not just contractual compliance. Partners must share (or at least accept) the principle that relationships and authenticity matter more than short-term financial optimization. This creates selection effects - certain business types self-select in, others self-exclude.

The model requires volume discipline that feels counterintuitive to growth-oriented thinking. Capping volume at levels a community can absorb means turning away bookings. Premium pricing partially compensates, but total revenue has mathematical ceilings. If you measure success purely by growth metrics, this model will frustrate you.

The model cannot prevent destination-level extraction by itself. Individual operator virtue cannot overcome collective action problems. Policy coordination - visitor caps, local ownership requirements, commission prohibitions - is necessary at municipal and regional levels to protect destinations from aggregate volume pressure.

And yet. The model has operated profitably for 20 years. It has maintained 100% partner retention. It has produced 31% guest return rates. It has retained 72% of revenue locally while achieving industry-standard margins. It has prevented the Tourism Area Life Cycle degradation in Soriano while our Civita operations demonstrated what happens when aggregate volume exceeds capacity.

This isn’t theory. It’s operational record.

The Framework Going Forward

I’ve submitted the academic version of this framework for peer review and scholarly critique. The tourism research community will determine whether the concepts hold up to rigorous examination, whether the mechanisms function as I’ve theorized, whether replication across contexts validates or challenges these claims.

This site exists to explore the practical implications. Every essay here will examine some aspect of how existential sustainability manifests in tourism - the structural constraints that make it work, the operational challenges that test it, the policy implications that could scale it beyond individual operators.

Some essays will examine what I’m calling performative sustainability - the certification schemes, carbon offsets, and CSR initiatives that create sustainability theater without structural change. Not to condemn them, but to understand why they fail the Sustainability Removal Test and what that means for their long-term effectiveness.

Some essays will examine specific mechanisms - how zero-commission policies build trust, how volume constraints prevent partner over-dependence, how fair pricing creates relationship quality that translates into business stability.

Some essays will examine the limits - what happens when destinations reach saturation, when competitors without constraints enter protected markets, when external shocks test the resilience of deep local integration.

The goal isn’t to convince you that this framework is the only way. The goal is to articulate structural principles that distinguish genuinely anti-extractive tourism from sustainability marketing. To provide concepts that help you evaluate whether a business model - yours or anyone’s - actually passes the Sustainability Removal Test.

A Different Question

Most sustainability discourse asks: “How can we reduce harm?” That’s a valuable question. But it accepts the basic structure of extractive business models and tries to mitigate their effects.

Existential sustainability asks a different question: “How can we design structures where harm is mechanically impossible?”

The answer requires constraints. Volume limits. Commission prohibitions. Local ownership requirements. Fair pricing. These constraints feel like sacrifices to growth-oriented thinking. But they’re also what create authenticity, build trust, maintain relationships, and produce businesses that can operate for decades without degrading the communities they depend on.

Twenty years in, I’m still learning what this structure makes possible and where its limits lie. The partner families in Soriano have become something more than vendors - their children have grown up with our guests visiting seasonally, their businesses have evolved alongside ours, their lives have integrated with what we’ve built together.

That integration is the point. Not stakeholder management, where interests are balanced. Stakeholder fusion, where interests become structurally indistinguishable.

I don’t have all the answers. I have 20 years of operational evidence and a framework that attempts to explain why it works. The academic community will test whether the explanation holds. The tourism industry will determine whether the model can scale.

But the central question remains: Can sustainability be removed without causing immediate business failure?

If the answer is yes, what you have is performance.

If the answer is no, what you have might be something worth understanding.