Edinburgh Festival Fringe includes more than 3,600 shows this year. The world’s largest arts festival, once again transforming Scotland’s capital into a global stage. But this year, something else opened first.

Just two weeks before the Fringe begins on Friday, Scotland’s first visitor levy came into effect: a 5% charge on overnight accommodation, forecast to raise around £50 million a year for the city.

The levy is a milestone. But money alone will not resolve the deeper question Edinburgh has wrestled with for years: what is tourism actually for? If the answer is simply “more visitors, more spending”, the city will keep winning by numbers while residents feel they are losing by experience.

In August, during the festival, hotel prices multiply, the Old Town becomes barely passable and some Edinburgh residents simply leave. The relationship between the festival and the people who live here is genuinely complex: enormous economic and cultural benefit, absorbed alongside substantial disruption.

This is where the idea of “regenerative tourism” offers a different ambition. Sustainable tourism asks how we can reduce harm – fewer emissions, less overcrowding, better waste management.

Regenerative tourism asks a bolder question: how can visitors leave a place better than they found it? Better for its communities, its culture, its public spaces and its local economy. It treats a destination not as a product to be consumed but as a living system to be strengthened.

Some destinations are already........

© The Conversation