LLNZ spoke to Anita Manfreda, co-editor of a new publication exploring the concept of sustainable luxury in the context of tourism and hospitality.
What sparked this book - and who are the people behind it?
Luxury tourism is having a bit of a PR moment. In one corner, it gets blamed for everything: excess, inequality, greenwashing. In the other, it gets celebrated as the saviour because it can “fund sustainability”. Both takes are convenient. Neither is enough. The three of us kept returning to the same question: if luxury has the most resources and the biggest influence, what should it be responsible for — and what does “doing better” actually look like when you can’t hide behind beautiful storytelling?
That question became Sustainable Luxury in Tourism and Hospitality: Contemporary Principles and Evolving Practices. The book is edited by Anita Manfreda (Torrens University Australia), whose expertise is in luxury tourism and its transformative and regenerative power, Frans Melissen (Breda University of Applied Sciences), whose long-time work has been on sustainable tourism and sustainability transitions, and Catheryn Khoo (Torrens University Australia), whose work advances tourism for good through social sustainability. We brought together contributors from different contexts to explore sustainable luxury as a real-world tension: full of possibility, full of contradictions, and increasingly central to what guests, operators, and destinations expect from the high end of tourism.
What do you mean by “sustainable luxury” - and is it just “green luxury”?
Sustainable luxury starts with a simple provocation. Luxury already sells an idea of “the best”. The question is what counts as “the best” now. For decades, luxury has signalled value through excess, rarity, and separation from everyday constraints. Sustainable luxury shifts the signal. It treats care, restraint, craftsmanship, and credibility as part of the premium, while still delivering comfort, ease, and delight.
This goes well beyond a few visible green gestures. Sustainable luxury brings environmental responsibility, social responsibility, cultural responsibility, and economic contribution into the same frame. That includes energy, water, and biodiversity, alongside decent work, staff wellbeing, inclusion, and respectful engagement with land, people and Indigenous culture. It also includes local value creation through supply chains and long-term partnerships. In Aotearoa New Zealand, guests arrive with expectations shaped by “clean and green” and the legacy of “100% Pure”. When those expectations are met with clarity and substance, sustainability becomes part of what makes the experience feel genuinely high-end.
Why does this conversation matter so much for luxury lodges in Aotearoa New Zealand?
Nature is central in Aotearoa New Zealand, and many lodges are built around extraordinary landscapes, ecosystems, dark skies, and a sense of remoteness. When the environment is part of what guests are paying to be close to, decisions about energy, water, waste, transport, and biodiversity protection carry a different weight. These choices not only shape but also impact the long-term viability of the experience.
At the same time, the New Zealand story is bigger than nature. The legacy of “100% Pure” and the wider clean-and-green reputation shape what visitors expect about integrity and care before they even arrive. Cultural responsibility also matters. Māori culture is foundational to place, and meaningful engagement requires respect, relationship, and benefit that flows back to communities. Social and economic sustainability belong in the same frame too. Lodges are employers and buyers in regional areas, and job quality, staff wellbeing, and local value creation influence whether luxury strengthens a destination over time or simply extracts from it.
Today's luxury guests are no longer passive consumers of experiences. For this market, beauty, comfort, and exclusivity are now baseline expectations, not differentiators. What distinguishes one lodge from another is whether its presence in a place is ethically coherent, culturally literate, and socially constructive. These guests would want to experience New Zealand through properties that embody care, not simply aestheticise it. They are drawn to lodges that can demonstrate, with credibility and depth, how they honour Māori relationships with land and heritage, invest in local livelihoods, safeguard ecological integrity, and cultivate dignified, meaningful work for staff. Properties that cannot articulate and substantiate their cultural, social, and environmental commitments are becoming strategically irrelevant.
What are some common guest perceptions and misconceptions about sustainable luxury?
A common misconception is that sustainability means compromise. Guests sometimes expect “eco” to come with fewer comforts, less indulgence, or a slightly sanctimonious vibe. In high-end lodging, the opposite can be true. Many of the choices that reduce environmental impact also improve the experience, such as better building performance, quieter energy systems, healthier materials, thoughtful food sourcing, and a stronger sense of place.
Another misconception is that the most visible gestures are the most meaningful. Guests often notice towel and linen prompts, refillable bathroom bottles, or recycling bins, and assume that is the full story. The heavier lifting usually sits behind the scenes, including wastewater systems, energy and heating choices, transport logistics, supplier standards, and staff working conditions. Cultural engagement can also be misunderstood. Some guests seek “authenticity” on demand, without realising that cultural experiences carry obligations and should be led, governed, and benefit the communities they come from. Clear, honest communication helps here. Guests appreciate knowing what a lodge prioritises and why, especially when it is explained without slogans.
How does sustainable luxury shape the guest experience?
The more consequential question is not how sustainable luxury shapes the guest experience, but how shifting guest expectations are reshaping luxury itself. Today’s high-end travellers are no longer content with surface-level refinement or aesthetic indulgences that are divorced from consequence. They bring ethical awareness into their consumption, and they are increasingly intolerant of experiences that feel performative or disconnected from place.
When experiences are well designed and executed, they often feel calmer and more thoughtful, with care embedded in the details. Guests notice quality in food provenance, the sense of place in design, and a quieter kind of confidence in service. That confidence often comes from well-run operations with supported teams, good training, and workplace cultures that don’t rely on invisible strain.
What are examples of sustainable practices that make sense for luxury lodges?
On the environmental side, impact often comes from the unglamorous work: efficient buildings, smart heating and cooling, renewable energy systems, serious water stewardship (including wastewater), and robust waste and circularity planning.
On the social, cultural, and economic side, practices include investing in staff wellbeing and development, improving job quality and retention, strengthening local supplier networks, and forming long-term partnerships with community organisations and experience providers. Cultural sustainability also matters: supporting Indigenous-led tourism where appropriate, following local protocols, and avoiding superficial cultural “add-ons” that look good in marketing but don’t build relationships or return value.
However, future-proof sustainable luxury moves beyond these practices and, as explained and showcased in various chapters of the book, contributes to creating a new relationship between luxury hospitality and tourism on the one hand, and increasingly important movements within the wider sustainability movement, such as environmental restoration, regeneration, rewilding and democratisation. More and more, sustainable luxury needs to account for emerging consumer self-awareness and value changes by moving beyond minimising its negative impacts and focusing on its role as a potential catalyst for sustainable development. This role embodies much more than visible practices to reduce negative impacts, but rather revolves around crafting one’s position within our collective journey towards a new relationship with nature and people. Sustainable luxury practices that have been shaped based on a conscious positioning of the experience provider within this journey are the ones that make most sense and that will resonate.
What’s the book’s intent in one message, for operators and guests?
Luxury keeps getting cast as the villain, and sometimes the critique is deserved. But luxury also has the resources and influence to lead in ways that can lift standards across tourism. This book exists to recalibrate how luxury is understood, delivered, and experienced. For operators, it offers a clear-eyed reading of the contemporary luxury guest, whose expectations are being reshaped by ethics, cultural literacy, environmental awareness, and a demand for integrity. It challenges operators to move beyond inherited models of prestige and excess, and to design experiences that are operationally coherent, socially constructive, and culturally credible.
Where can people buy the book?
Sustainable Luxury in Tourism and Hospitality: Contemporary Principles and Evolving Practices is published by Channel View Publications / Multilingual Matters and is available here.