The IMPACT Magazine Volume 2
The Words We Travel By
The language of tourism shapes who belongs, who holds power, and how we relate to place.
By Izabela Jaroszynski
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Estimated read time: 6 minutes ↓
Tourism is built on familiar language: destinations, experiences, hidden gems, visitors, growth. These words appear so frequently in our strategies, marketing campaigns, and industry conversations that they have faded into the background, becoming the invisible scaffolding of how we talk about travel. Yet, we rarely stop to consider what they imply about our relationship to the places we visit, or to the people who call those places home.
For a growing number of regenerative thinkers and storytellers, however, language is far from neutral. The words we choose reveal how we understand our relationship to place, community, and one another.
Michelle Holliday, a speaker, researcher and author of The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World, has been working in living systems thinking and regeneration for more than two decades. Language, she maintains, is the most accessible place to begin regenerative work.
"People are drawn to living systems thinking and then they want to know, where do I start? What should I do first. And my answer has almost always been: start with language," Michelle says.
"It doesn't cost you anything to experiment with shifting your language. Go into it with some curiosity just to see what else comes into view."
Michelle encourages organizations to pay attention to the metaphors embedded in their everyday vocabulary. How often do conversations rely on the language of war, extraction, domination, or consumption? What happens when those metaphors are replaced with the language of living systems, such as cultivation, stewardship, care, and relationship?
"One DMO had a strategy to 'get organized, lay the foundation, build momentum and accelerate.' Together, we explored what more came into view — and what would change — if their strategy were to be 'prepare the ground, plant the seeds, tend the garden, gather the harvest.' It shifted the conversation dramatically," Michelle says. "In another context, someone asked, 'Where are we going with this?' And I proposed a shift to, 'What are we growing with this?'"
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At first glance, the distinction may seem subtle. Yet Michelle argues that language reveals something deeper: the worldview beneath it.
A destination can be viewed as a product to market or a home to be respected. Visitors can be consumers or participants. Communities can be tourism assets or living places with their own aspirations, histories, and futures.
The language we choose signals which of those visions we believe.
In conventional tourism narratives, places often exist primarily for the benefit of visitors. Communities become destinations. Landscapes become attractions. Culture becomes experience.
Regenerative thinking starts from a different premise. Places are homes before they are destinations. Communities have stories, needs, and aspirations that exist independently of tourism. Visitors are invited into those stories, but they are not the centre of them.
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JoAnna Haugen, a writer, public speaker, and founder of Rooted Storytelling, sees the tendency to centre the traveller above all else as one of the most persistent challenges in travel media.
"Just as tourism itself has been extractive, the way we position travellers as part of a 'hero's journey' or through a 'self-transformation' lens in travel-related storytelling can also be extractive and harmful to places and the people who live there," she says.
When tourism stories focus primarily on the visitor's desires, communities risk becoming little more than scenery.
"When travellers are centred, it is more likely for places and experiences to shape themselves around the traveller," JoAnna explains. "This can cause shifts in culture or experiences so they then evolve to become more traveller-centric."
The result is not simply a storytelling problem. It is a relationship problem.
Regenerative tourism often asks practitioners to think differently about economic systems, ecological systems, and community well-being. JoAnna argues that the same shift must happen in the stories we tell.
"De-centring travellers in storytelling isn't about making the experience less meaningful for them," she says. "But it is about shifting the focus from extraction to relationship — how the traveller, community, and place co-exist together."
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In destination marketing, word choices and context also matter, she says.
Words such as 'exotic', 'cheap', 'hidden', and 'wild' can be problematic if not given appropriate context.
"The problem with tourism marketing and communications is that we like to use alluring and undefined words like these because it's easy," JoAnna says.
"Without any additional context, they conjure up images and ideas that appeal to travellers of privilege — namely able-bodied, white people from high-income countries. This can reinforce harmful stereotypes about communities and places, which then creates a self-fulfilling loop of potentially setting inappropriate traveller expectations and influencing inappropriate behaviour."
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Image credit: BC Farmers' Markets/Geoffrey Tomlin-Hood
One simple way to examine that shift is to look at the verbs.
Words such as "discover," "explore," and "capture" position the traveller as the primary actor. By contrast, words such as "learn from," "listen to," and "support" suggest a relationship that exists beyond the traveller's personal experience.
The difference may seem small, yet these choices shape how people imagine travel before they ever leave home.
Long before a traveller arrives somewhere, language has already begun creating expectations about what that place is, who it belongs to, and what role the visitor will play within it.
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"Just as tourism itself has been extractive, the way we position travellers as part of a 'hero's journey' or through a 'self-transformation' lens in travel-related storytelling can also be extractive and harmful to places and the people who live there."
Michelle points to the word hospitality itself, which tourism has largely reduced to a business category associated with accommodations and service. Historically, however, the concept carried much deeper meaning.
"It has the same root as hospital and hospice, so you can see how much is held within that word," she says. "And in some languages, the word for host and guest are the same. There's something fascinating in that. If I'm hosting you, you're also hosting me. We're always hosting each other."
Hospitality, in this sense, is not a transaction, but rather an exchange of care, responsibility, and reciprocity.
The idea resonates with regenerative thinking because it challenges the notion that only one side is giving while the other is receiving.
"When people ask me what I think tourism will look like in 100 years, I say that if it goes really well, we won't have the word tourism anymore," Michelle says.
"The word itself seems to hold a transactional relationship: I'm the tourist and I come with money so you owe me, but I have no obligation to you. I think we have to change our language starting there and deepening into the more profound meanings behind hosting and hospitality."
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A good place to start, JoAnna says, is by mending relationships with communities tourism has hurt in the past.
"This might be painful, frustrating, and challenging, and it can take a long time and take different forms and shapes, but it's important work if tourism is going to meaningfully support people and places — and if the resulting stories are going to reflect this reality."
Those working in the traditional tourism sphere need to be okay with the fact that what this looks like isn't up to them.
"Tourism is not the hero of this story; it is a partner in the community fabric," JoAnna says. "How we share that story is different from the tourism stories we're used to seeing and hearing, but this has the capacity to create a more genuine, textured, accessible, imperfect, and honest tourism narrative."
This is the deeper invitation hidden within regenerative language.
Not simply to replace one set of words with another, but to rethink the relationships those words describe. To move beyond transactions and toward reciprocity. To see destinations as homes rather than products. To recognize that communities are not backdrops for somebody else's transformation.
And to remember that every act of hospitality changes both the host and the guest.
In French, the word hôte can mean both host and guest, a seeming contradiction until you remember Michelle’s words about the reciprocity of hosting.
In a world increasingly defined by division, loneliness, and disconnection, that may be one of the most important stories tourism has to tell.
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