By Donia Hamouda

At the WTTC Global Summit in Malta, Cara Morton and Mark Weingard asked what tourism actually leaves behind in the places it depends on. Each started from a different point. Morton looked at how travel is designed and sold, and Weingard at how a hotel lives alongside its neighbours. Both arrived at the same conclusion: tourism’s contribution to a community cannot be left to the traveller’s goodwill.

The session was titled The Impact-Oriented Traveller, and its premise was a familiar one: many people now want to leave a destination better than they found it. The discussion quickly moved past the traveller. Johanna Jainchill, Editor in Chief of Travel Weekly, moderated. Her two guests were Cara Morton, CEO Global Businesses & Operations at Zurich Insurance Group, and Mark Weingard, CEO & Founder of Iniala. Neither treated good intentions as the solution. The real question was whether businesses make it possible to act on them.

Value, but not only for the wealthy

“From volume to value” has become one of the most repeated phrases in tourism, and Malta’s Minister of Tourism had used it earlier in the summit. Its meaning is often left vague.

Morton gave it a precise shape. She pointed to the World Economic Forum’s Travel & Tourism Development Index 2026, which ranked Japan first, and to bookings in Japan’s rural areas growing faster than in its cities. The distinction she drew was between travellers who pass through a place and those who become part of it: visitors who are “not necessarily just traveling what I call through a destination, but they’re embedding themselves and getting involved with local communities.”

Her definition of value involved three parties: “We want to see value for travelers, the communities, and the businesses, right?”

The most unexpected caution came from the luxury hotelier. Weingard warned that “value” can easily become a polite word for wealth:

“I don’t want the world to become focused on bringing in too high value travelers because then we’re almost being elitist in the way that we act.”

Coming from the founder of a high-end hotel brand, the point carries weight. The test he proposed has nothing to do with the size of a guest’s budget. It is whether travel “benefits the cities that it’s in, that it doesn’t destroy the culture, doesn’t destroy the neighborhoods.” By that measure, a destination can raise its average spend and still fail its residents.

The problem with “fries with that”

Morton’s sharpest criticism was aimed at how the industry packages responsibility. Today, sustainability usually appears at the end of the booking path, as an extra the customer may or may not buy:

“We need to move away from sustainability as being an optional extra, right? You know, like can I have fries with that?”

The image works because it is so ordinary. An airline asks whether the passenger wants to pay to offset their carbon footprint, and the outcome depends on a click. Morton’s alternative moves the decision upstream, from the customer to the people who build the product:

“We should be looking at building sustainability and sustainable tourism into the base product.”

The argument goes beyond environmental policy. If responsibility is an add-on, its impact is limited to the travellers who choose it. If it is part of the product, every booking carries it. Morton compared it to service standards that customers never have to request because they are already built in, and called for travel to be redesigned “from the bottom up”.

Jainchill gave the point a strategic frame, recalling remarks made by Prince Harry in New York on behalf of Travalyst. As she reported them, he argued that when destinations thrive, travel and tourism thrive, and that sustainability belongs inside the business strategy rather than alongside it.

Cara Morton, CEO Global Businesses & Operations at Zurich Insurance Group, at the WTTC Global Summit in Malta | 2026

A question every hotel should ask itself

Weingard took the debate somewhere more uncomfortable. The industry, he noted, has talked about sustainability for 10 to 15 years, through labels such as Green Key and efforts to reduce environmental harm. That work matters, but it measures how much damage is avoided. His question was what a business adds:

“We need to talk today about increasing the positive impact that we as an industry can make on the communities.”

He then addressed the hotels and cruise lines in the room with a question few would want to see in an annual report:

“Are we actually, you know, part of this community or are we just a business that’s sitting there just draining from them?”

The word “draining” is deliberate. It describes a business that takes from a neighbourhood (its streets, its atmosphere, its reputation) without giving anything back. Weingard’s answer in Malta is PACT (Positive Action Community Tourism), an initiative launched in Valletta and the Grand Harbour area as a pact between residents and hospitality businesses. Its stated purpose is to support local festivals, charities and cultural organisations, and to make sure hospitality is not experienced as “a threat to their everyday life”.

Listening as a method

When Jainchill asked what “regenerative travel” means in practice, Weingard set aside the buzzword and described a method instead:

“We need to actually ask the community what they want. We don’t need to guess.”

The list he gave was concrete: local councils, arts institutions, churches, carnival organisers. The question to put to them was just as simple: “How can we help you? How can we be a part of this? How do we support you?”

“We need to listen and not just act.”

This is the most demanding idea of the panel, because it takes control away from the business. Much corporate community work starts from what the company finds easy to give or easy to communicate. Weingard reverses the order: needs are defined by residents first, and support follows.

Morton reached the same point from the distribution side. Large tour operators, she said, need to connect with small local businesses in the countries where they operate, because that is how the industry reaches communities and leaves a lasting impact. The panel’s conclusion followed logically: there is no single model, and the work has to be done country by country.

The dividend nobody reports

Weingard’s most useful concept for hotel leaders is the “social dividend”. Businesses already track their financial returns. He asks them to track another kind:

“We look for our dividends, the economic dividend. We need to look also the social dividend.”

He measured it in terms of pride:

“The employees will be proud to work there. The neighbors will be proud to have us as part of that community.”

These indicators are harder to measure than occupancy or average rate, but they say more about whether a hotel is welcome where it stands. In Weingard’s account, earning that pride means donating to carnivals, church processions and neighbourhood festivals, and sending staff to take part in them. It also means resisting a familiar temptation: “Let’s open more restaurants, open more bars, you know, let’s use all the space here. Let’s get rid of those festivals.”

His warning drew on a recent example. Without that restraint, destinations end up like Barcelona, where residents have turned water pistols on tourists. His conclusion was a matter of self-interest as much as principle:

“We need to support the culture in each of the neighborhoods we’re in.”

The logic is hard to dispute. The authenticity hotels promise their guests depends on traditions that only survive if residents keep the space, the means and the will to maintain them.

Making commitment visible when travellers book

If business is part of the problem, it can also be part of the answer. Morton recalled an example from Australia: her organisation supported Make A Wave, a SurfAid campaign that raises funds for isolated communities in Indonesia, helping bring them water and medical care. The response was not what she expected:

“Travelers wanted to be connected with us and buy our product because of who we were, you know, engaging with.”

Her story suggests that community commitment can create a real bond with customers, provided they know about it. Weingard took the idea to the point where travellers make their choice: the booking platform.

“We also need to make sure that the organizations like Expedia like Virtuoso they push people towards companies that really do give back.”

He described a proposal for community standards with three levels (committed, achiever and leader) that distributors could display, much as environmental labels are shown today. This remains an idea, not an existing certification or a commitment from either company. It does, however, address a real blind spot: a hotel’s local contribution is invisible on most booking sites, so travellers cannot reward it.

Weingard believes the demand already exists, especially among younger travellers, and summed up their expectation in his own words: “I want to stay at a place that’s giving back. I don’t just want to stay at a place that really is just making money out of me.”

AI as a way to spread the crowds

Morton’s last idea concerned trip planning. Her example will be familiar to anyone who has visited Paris: following the standard top-ten list, a visitor queues for hours to photograph the Mona Lisa over a crowd, when another museum would have offered a better visit without the wait.

She sees AI as a way to break that pattern by moving travellers away from “the top 10 and all the Instagramable sites” towards experiences that are just as rewarding and spread their benefits to more communities. The potential lies less in convenience than in direction: a planning tool that widens choices could ease pressure on saturated sites and send visitors and their spending to places they would otherwise miss.

From passion to duty

The panel’s closing moment gave everything that came before it a personal weight. Asked how he came to this work, Weingard said some would call him the unluckiest man in the world. He was in New York on 11 September 2001 and did not go into the World Trade Center that day. A year later, his girlfriend was killed in the Bali terrorist attack. Two years after that, the Indian Ocean tsunami struck his house, and he survived. He calls himself the luckiest man in the world. Those three years convinced him he had to make a positive impact with his life.

“Hospitality is my passion, giving back is my responsibility.”

The next sentence matters more for the industry, because it removes the most common excuse:

“You don’t have to be passionate about giving back. You have to give back.”

In other words, community contribution should not depend on whether a CEO happens to care about it. It is part of the job. His final request to the audience was practical: every business should sit down and work out how it can work with its neighbourhood.

Taken together, the two speakers offered a clear line of reasoning. Morton showed that responsibility has to be built into how travel is designed and sold. Weingard showed that it starts with a conversation with the people who live next door. The neighbours’ verdict may be the most honest measure of what tourism leaves behind.

Mark Weingard, CEO & Founder of Iniala, at the WTTC Global Summit in Malta | 2026