Leading with Heart: Women as Catalysts for Regenerative Tourism

This ~38-minute panel session at ITB Berlin, titled 'Leading with Heart: Women as Catalysts for Regenerative Tourism,' was moderated by Catherine Gallagher, co-founder of Women Travel Leaders, who has been in the travel industry for 16 years. The panel featured four women leaders: Vanessa Marino (Founder & Managing Director, Amazon Emotions), Megan Parkinson (European Hub Manager, The Long Run), Dr. Azam Bahrami Barogh (Founder, Middle East and West Asia Ecotourism Network, currently based in the Netherlands), and Amanda Ho (Co-Founder & CEO, Regenerative Travel).

Gallagher opened by invoking Anna Pollock's 'conscious travel' philosophy — 'creating the conditions for life to thrive' — as the intellectual foundation for the session, noting that women have been practicing regenerative principles long before the label existed.

Vanessa Marino shared how she arrived in the Brazilian Amazon at age 17, traveled through Venezuela and across the Americas exchanging work for food and accommodation, fell in love with the Amazon, and eventually founded Amazon Emotions — a conservation-driven ecotourism company she has now operated for 25 years. She described the core challenge as continuously educating tour operators, travel agencies, and travel designers on what to expect when visiting local host communities. She highlighted the troubling industry trend around 'authenticity' as a word that places unfair, performance-like expectations on indigenous and local people: 'Is something authentic in the end? Is something that probably we need to reflect about.' She stressed the primacy of mutual respect — listening, communicating, and treating visits as encounters with people, not just fauna and flora.

Megan Parkinson of The Long Run described their four-C framework — Conservation, Culture, Community, and Commerce — as the lens through which travel businesses build long-term sustainability strategies. She explained that sustainability often fails because it remains optional, and when budgets tighten, it is the first thing cut. She shared the case study of Tis Corral at Sinald de Valet in Brazil's Atlantic Rainforest — one of the most endangered forests in the world — where biohubs were created to break down silos between conservation, community, and tourism. Women in those communities became the primary catalysts, not by design but by seizing opportunities absent elsewhere. These women hosted trails connecting the biohubs, brought sisters, aunties, and friends into capacity-building programs, and the model was so successful it was replicated across Latin America as the 'Guardians of the Land' program. Parkinson also described a South African example where leaders explicitly rejected the language of 'empowerment' and 'uplift,' instead insisting on partnership language: everyone is part of the same community moving forward together.

Dr. Azam Bahrami Barogh delivered an emotionally charged account of events in Iran in January (the year was not explicitly stated but contextually recent): more than 30,000 young people were killed while peacefully protesting for dignity and freedom, with minimal global reaction. She described an unexpected regenerative response — instead of wearing black or mourning traditionally, Iranians in 160 cities transformed cemeteries into celebration sites, wearing white and dancing, drawing on the 1,000-year-old Persian epic the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi and the character Siavash. She framed this as ancient wisdom and cultural resilience — regenerative practice rooted in Iranian history. She then pivoted to her professional work with Qeshm Island (a UNESCO Global Geopark in southern Iran), where women lead ecotourism lodges called 'boomgards,' teach children to grow mangrove seeds at home and replant them in September, and run a doll-making project using recycled leftover clothes. These dolls are sent to children with cancer across Iran, with an invitation to visit the island when they recover — weaving together sustainability, skill-building, and emotional wellbeing.

Amanda Ho, who started her career as a journalist at age 22 with a New York magazine called Electrifying Magazine covering travel and lifestyle, described how she came to regenerative tourism through meeting her co-founder David Levthal (owner of Playa Viva) at a luxury travel trade show called Pure Life Experiences, where she also encountered Anna Pollock's concept of co-evolution — the idea that regeneration is not episodic but always evolving. She announced the recent launch of her book on regenerative tourism and hospitality. Amanda argued that regeneration cannot be mandated through climate data alone; it must be sparked through emotional storytelling, beautiful branding, and people-led narratives. She warned that in the age of AI, homogenized content created through ChatGPT is making everyone sound the same, and called for authentic, fearless original voices. She noted that seven years ago, when Regenerative Travel launched, 'no one was listening,' but that ITB Berlin now has an entire track dedicated to regeneration, signaling major movement growth.