Does responsible luxury tourism protect nature or rebrand it?

Luxury travel often evokes images of butler service, Michelin-starred chefs, infinity pools, and destinations so remote that they appear untouched and uninhabited. However, the question increasingly confronting the hospitality industry is: What are the larger costs of having these luxuries on offer? 

The best locations often coincide with the most fragile environments, placing responsible luxury tourism at the centre of a widening ethical and ecological debate. For instance, a front-row seat to the Great Migration in the Maasai Mara at a hotel charging $5,000 per night offers spectacle, but such developments disrupt the animals’ migration routes and place additional stress on an already under strain. 

Similarly, the creation of man-made islands in the Maldives often requires dredging, coral removal, and the destruction of marine habitats. In both cases, the experience depends on altering rather than preserving the very landscapes that attract travellers in the first place.

Luxury tourism sustainability and the true cost of infrastructure

Beyond visible environmental damage, luxury hotels and resorts carry hidden infrastructural costs. Energy-intensive buildings, extensive water and waste systems, and food imports all contribute to their ecological footprints. The tension between indulgence and responsibility is one that the hospitality industry worldwide has only just begun to confront.

James McBride, founder of NIHI on Sumba Island in eastern Indonesia—repeatedly named among the world’s best hotels by Travel + Leisure as well as the World’s 50 Best Hotels—rejects the idea that luxury and responsibility are inherently opposed. “Comfort can coexist with responsibility when design respects the land, when sourcing is local, and when operations uplift rather than extract. Every project must contribute more to its island than it takes away,” he says. 

Tourism alone, argues McBride, does not preserve a place. Its people do. In Sumba, NIHI’s long-term investment in health, nutrition, education, and opportunity has created stewardship of the land. “The Matayangu Waterfall remains pristine because the community values it. When people are taken care of, the land naturally follows,” he says.

Even with rules in place, tourism can quickly overwhelm fragile systems.

In Ranthambore, Jaisal Singh, founder of Sujan properties, notes that tourism has created livelihoods and reinforced the value of tigers. However, a viral video of ten jeeps surrounding a single tiger reveals the risks of popularity without proper regulation. “When tourism is well managed, it remains one of the most effective tools for conservation,” he says. “But management is everything.”

In India, however, tourism pressure extends well beyond wildlife parks, playing out across heritage sites, coastlines, and hill towns, where tourist attention often outpaces regulation and impact is harder to trace. 

Dereck Joubert, founder of Great Plains Conservation in Kenya, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, insists that what damages ecosystems is not luxury, but volume. “We don’t do high-impact luxury,” he says. “We do low-impact, high-value tourism,” explains Joubert. “If you charge a guest $4,000 a night, you can fund conservation with far less human impact. To achieve the same revenue at $100 a night, you’d need 40 guests—and that would be ecologically disastrous.”

At Great Plains, operational profits, when available, are divided into three parcels: 33 per cent to conservation, 33 per cent to community work, and 33 per cent to expand operations. Additional funds for conservation are raised through talks and guest donations, generating $5 million to $10 million annually, “almost entirely because robust, high-value luxury tourism is in place,” adds Joubert.

“The hospitality space has been hijacked by property developers who care only about increasing real estate value” — Jules Perowne

While effective for conservation, low-volume, high-value tourism also limits access to a narrow, wealthy audience, complicating who conservation ultimately serves—ecosystems, local communities, or those who can afford proximity to them. 

Mona Vanhawati, a new hotelier and owner of Bagh Tola in Bandhavgarh, believes responsibility comes with accepting its true cost. At Bagh Tola, only a small portion of the estate has been developed, with a major tract of the land left wild as part of the surrounding forest ecosystem. “How many hoteliers can truly afford to do that—or choose to do so regardless?” she asks.

In the best cases, sustainability shapes the property and is part of its DNA. In the hospitality industry, Six Senses and Soneva are often cited as benchmarks for this approach.

Jules Perowne, the founder of Perowne International, a luxury marketing consultancy firm that works with leading hotel brands including Raffles and Six Senses, points to projects that demonstrate how sustainability can be embedded at scale. “Take a brand like Singita—it has an incredibly sustainable safari experience.”

Singita tailors its conservation efforts to each country in which it operates, responding to the specific needs of each ecosystem. In South Africa, this has meant a long-standing commitment to protecting the white rhino, from having highly trained anti-poaching units to a dedicated rhino orphan sanctuary. In Rwanda, the brand has partnered with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, supporting the protection of endangered mountain gorillas and their forest habitat. In Botswana, the conservation-first philosophy will extend even further with the opening of Singita Elela at the end of 2026.

“If you charge a guest $4,000 a night, you can fund conservation with far less human impact” - Dereck Joubert

“Take Wildland in Scotland, for example,” Perowne continues, “which has a 200-year vision to renature, preserve, and respect some of the most pristine land in the northern hemisphere. Or 62 Nord—soon to be called Geographic—which has done significant work to protect the Sunnmore Region of Norway, including  championing hydrogen reserves to service the boats in the region, and is looking to expand beyond in the years ahead.”

“The hospitality space has been hijacked by property developers who care only about increasing real estate value, plonking hotels on land and selling residences. It’s a pandemic of overdevelopment at the moment, and it’s extremely concerning,” says Perowne.

The consequences of overdevelopment are now visible in the Maasai Mara. Joubert adds: “Morally and ethically, I would never build at a wildebeest crossing point. It threatens the migration and may even prevent it from entering the Mara at all. Compromising on my version of luxury is compromising on conservation and nature itself. We should never be happy with fewer lions or elephants—a luxury we want to share.”

Do travellers value responsible luxury tourism?

While some hotels exercise responsibility and do the right thing, do travellers care? Taruna Seth, founder of luxury travel agency Encompass Experiences, observes that travellers don’t always switch to a more responsible option automatically. “Sustainable lodges often carry a premium because of the conservation and community work they support. Our role is to educate travellers about the choices, the value their stay contributes, and why sustainability can coexist with luxury. Luxury today is shifting from being purely about thread count to being about conscience, connection, and context.” For many younger travellers, ethical intent often coexists with aspirational desire, where awareness does not always override convenience, status or visibility.

“Every project must contribute more to its island than it takes away” - James McBride

“Ultimately, people want to have a wonderful time on their travels. Travel brings joy, and that’s the primary objective of what we do. But there are more opportunities to have these wonderful moments in a sustainable way,” says Perowne. “Responsible travel, and aligning with brands that genuinely care, is critical to the next generation of travellers. They are very conscious of where they align their own brand and increasingly turn away from large groups focused solely on growth.” 

Stewardship, however, does not always translate into control. Even in community-led models, local people are rarely the ones who decide how land is owned or how priorities shift over time. The more difficult question is whether responsibility sometimes means restraint, accepting that some places cannot be developed, offset, or made sustainable through scale.

Anthropologist Meher Varma offers a different perspective. She believes tourism by default is neither ethical nor responsible—but it has existed for as long as humans have moved in search of meaning, trade, and connection. That does not mean we stop travelling; it means we stop outsourcing responsibility.

“Giving back doesn’t begin or end with a hotel,” she says. “It’s about what you do once you are in a place—how you behave, how you engage [with the locals], and whether you make the effort to understand the culture you are stepping into.” 

Luxury must be measured by awareness and by the willingness of travellers to recognise that presence always has an impact. The future of responsible luxury tourism may depend less on where we go, and more on how we show up once we arrive.