Edinburgh Festival image Euan CherryEdinburgh 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.
Edinburgh is uniquely placed to become the first ‘regenerative festival city’.
TTstudio
Some destinations are already moving this way. New Zealand has built a national approach around the Tiaki Promise and Queenstown Lakes is pursuing a carbon-zero visitor economy. Hawaii, too, has embedded regenerative principles in destination planning. But no city has yet claimed the territory Edinburgh is uniquely placed to occupy: the world’s first regenerative festival city – a place where the very events that draw millions become the engine of community renewal.
Five ingredients
Edinburgh has the ingredients. A world-famous cultural asset. A newly created revenue stream. And, crucially, an agreed set of levy investment programmes covering city infrastructure, culture and heritage, and destination management, worth over £90 million across three years – the first scheme of its kind in the UK. The question is whether this foundation will be used regeneratively, or merely defensively.
So what would a regenerative festival city look like?
First, keep more tourism value in the city. Festival spending famously flows through international hotel chains, booking platforms and temporary operators. Procurement rules for levy-funded projects could prioritise local suppliers, social enterprises and community-owned venues – following the “community wealth building” logic pioneered in Preston in England, where anchor institutions redirected spending into the local economy.
Even mass-tourism destinations show this is commercially viable: Bulgaria’s Albena resort supplies over half the fresh food in its restaurants from its own farms and invests €1 from every overnight stay into a green fund for local projects – retaining and reinvesting value as core business practice, not charity.
Second, support fair, year-round work. Tourism employment in Edinburgh peaks dramatically in August and thins out in winter. Levy investment in a year-round events calendar – winter festivals, off-season cultural programming, conference development – would smooth demand and turn precarious seasonal jobs into sustainable careers. This matters for performers too: many Fringe artists still subsidise their own appearances through savings and crowdfunding. A festival city that burns out its own cultural workers is consuming its future.
Third, invest beyond the postcard. The Royal Mile does not need more visitors; other areas such as Leith, Portobello, Craigmillar and Wester Hailes could benefit from them. Ljubljana in Slovenia – Europe’s first zero-waste capital – shows that when planning puts residents’ quality of life first, visitors experience a better city as a direct consequence.
Fourth, give residents and cultural workers a real seat at the table. Edinburgh’s Visitor Levy Forum is a start, but regenerative destinations go further. Research on community tourism enterprises shows that festivals can rebuild a community’s confidence and sense of place when residents shape them – not merely host them. Edinburgh could craft its own civic promise, co-written with residents, artists and festival workers, setting out what the city asks of its guests – not just what it sells them.
Fifth, reward visitors who contribute. Copenhagen’s CopenPay scheme, now permanent, offers free museum entry, meals and experiences to tourists who cycle, take public transport, or volunteer in community gardens – and cities from Helsinki to Berlin are queuing up to copy it. Imagine a “FringeBack” pass: free tickets for visitors who volunteer at community venues or arrive by train.
Finally, measure what tourism leaves behind. Success should be reported not only in arrivals and spend, but in resident wellbeing, local business survival, affordable housing pressure and cultural participation by Edinburgh’s own communities. What gets measured gets managed – and what gets celebrated gets repeated.
A model for the UK
Manchester and Liverpool have introduced modest visitor charges, Glasgow’s 5% levy arrives in 2027 and Wales has legislated for its own. All will be watching Edinburgh.
If the capital shows that a levy can fund regeneration rather than just mitigation – strengthening communities instead of simply cleaning up after crowds – it could redefine what tourism success means across the UK.
I have been living in Edinburgh for 16 years. Every August I watch the city give the world an extraordinary gift and quietly absorb the cost of giving it. This summer, for the first time, Edinburgh has both the means and the moment to ask for something back – not from visitors’ wallets alone, but from tourism itself.
The Fringe invites the world to take part. The world’s first regenerative festival city would invite the world to give back.
Veselina Stoyanova does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.