Prof. Alessandro Inversini

INSIDER VOICE

Prof. Alessandro Inversini

Prof. Dr. Alessandro Inversini Alessandro Inversini is Full Professor in Marketing at EHL Hospitality Business School in Lausanne, where his research focuses on digital transformation and regeneration in travel, tourism, and hospitality. He holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from the Università della Svizzera Italiana, and before joining EHL held academic posts at Henley Business School (University of Reading) and Bournemouth University. He currently leads the Innosuisse-funded Resilient Tourism flagship project and developed the Regenerative Hospitality Canva, a widely used playbook helping hoteliers move from net-zero to net-positive practices, tested with partners including Geneva Marriott Hotel, Hilton Geneva, and Six Senses Crans Montana. His path into the topic traces back to fieldwork in rural Lebanon, where a visit to the Shouf Cedar Reserve gave him what he’s called an “Aha! Moment” about what regeneration could mean for hospitality. He is the author of Regenerative Hospitality: Strategies for Transformative Hospitality Leaders (Edward Elgar Publishing) and co-editor, with Prof. Dr. Willy Legrand, of The Hotel Yearbook 2026 – Sustainability Edition: The Regenerative Question.

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Professor and Deputy Dean EHL

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Her perspective on regenerative travel

“”Regeneration in hospitality capitalises on the understanding that we and our businesses are not just extractive by design, but we co-exist with an intricated and interconnected set of living systems. Therefore, just as we can take from them, we can also give back.” “

On the credibility gap

“”Regenerative economics starts from interconnectedness. Hotels are not single entities; they are embedded in a community and an environment. Regeneration is about making that connection visible, tangible, and positive for all.””

What she looks for

“”Regeneration is not a recipe – it is a process of listening, trying, failing, and learning. Regenerative professionals do not intend to introduce new regenerative metrics or propose specific measurements or scales. There are no checklists to adhere to; there are no standards whatsoever. Rather, the impact of regeneration is visible by the hotel staff and their guests, because regeneration is systemic yet local, and its ripple effect can be seen in the restoration, enhancement and co-evolution of the local ecosystems.””

Four questions from Veriva

Honest View

What makes a place regenerative rather than merely sustainable?

“I feel a place becomes regenerative when the people living there understand that the systems around them — the natural system and the social system — are interconnected. The shared thinking should be: what I do to nature somehow affects the community; what I do in the community comes back to nature. Everything is interconnected; once that understanding lands, the question changes. You stop asking “how do I preserve the status quo?” and start asking “what can I do to make this place better?” Regeneration is about contributing, restoring and enhancing — not holding a line. It is about net-positive impact on the interconnected ecosystems. This isn’t theory. It’s a matter of how a person perceives themselves inside those interconnected systems, and what they decide to give back. And the interesting thing is that it starts as a personal journey and it has the possibility of becoming a collective one. I always like to quote Bill Reed on this: “the goal of regeneration is regenerating our capability of taking our own role on this planet”. This is how one recognizes a regenerative place: there is an inner energy to go beyond and a true interest for a personal and collective growth. “

A reason for hope

When someone tells you a place is doing good work — what makes you believe them, and what makes you doubt?

“I saw several destinations and several hotels claiming to do regenerative work; the one I suddenly believed were the ones that made me ‘vibrating’ inside: those few places felt alive, and the change was driven from the people, bottom up. Regeneration is notoriously hard to measure, so conventional KPIs only take you so far. What I look for instead is evidence in the real world: in the nature around the place, in the community, and in the experience of the people visiting. The clearest signal is the ripple effect — how much further change the original change triggers. Are people moving back to live and work there? Are new businesses starting? Are those businesses genuinely local, rooted in that specific place? Ultimately, when a place is doing good work, it blossoms on every level at once: ecological, social, experiential and of course economic. That’s difficult to fake, and it’s why I’m skeptical of claims that exist only on paper. “

The honest critique

What does the travel industry need to stop doing — including your own part of it?

“The travel industry needs to stop pretending. Pretending to do sustainable activities on the shoulders of the travelers. This is a criticism I put directly to my hotelier friends. Too often the sustainability section of the annual report is built on initiatives that sit entirely on the customer’s shoulders: don’t waste water, reuse your towels and so on. That gets reported as an achievement. But…is it? Meanwhile, the things that genuinely matter often go unmentioned — sponsoring the local football team, donating chairs to the school, offering free stays as prizes for local competitions. There are countless ways a hotelier can contribute to the community around them, and many are already doing it without recognizing it as the real work. So: stop dressing up customer inconvenience as environmental leadership, and start doing — and reporting — what actually supports the community you sit in. Ultimately this is about being proud of your actions, not your communications. “

I saw several destinations and several hotels claiming to do regenerative work; the one I suddenly believed were the ones that made me ‘vibrating’ inside: those few places felt alive, and the change was driven from the people, bottom up.

The one place

Name one place that changed how you think about travel. What happened there?

“Lebanon. I was there doing fieldwork, building a mobile application to help local providers in a biosphere reserve promote bottom-up experiences. I went as a technology and digital marketing academic, meeting service providers, doing my job. Then I met Chibli. He had left the city to return to his parents’ farm in the mountains, growing crops and raising animals the way his grandfather had. People became curious about what he was doing. They started visiting. He built a few small rooms to host them, and gradually the whole community took an interest. That’s where I saw a genuinely different way of doing hospitality. Chibli wasn’t selling beds. He started from his own deeply connection with nature with the land, with the community, and with the people who came — and that connection changed both his perception of the world and theirs. Hospitality – authentic hospitality came as a consequence. “

Location

Lebanon

Best time to travel

Autumn

Articles in the media

Regenerative Hospitality

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