Set against the backdrop of idyllic travel destinations and lavish five-star resorts, Mike White’s The White Lotus offers a cutting commentary on upper class social relationships. Each season features a distinct location: the first set in Maui, Hawaii, the second in Taormina, Sicily, and the third and current season on the island of (Koh) Samui, one of Thailand’s most popular destinations for picturesque beaches and peaceful retreat. Caricaturing the types of wealthy patrons such luxurious resorts cater to, the series is lauded for its revealing portrayal of social dynamics and its keen awareness of privilege and power. Though the narrative centers the hotels’ wealthy and predominantly white guests, it simultaneously highlights the economic, cultural, and environmental exploitation that accompanies luxury tourism, taking place behind the scenes and in plain sight.
When paradise provides no escape from their upper class disaffection, the guests bring their vices and ills with them on vacation, unknowingly imposing themselves on the local people and environments. Meanwhile, they remain largely unaware of their privilege, taking for granted their ease of mobility and the way environments are catered to their comfort. White Lotus brings the harms of luxury tourism to the forefront, showing how land theft, labor exploitation, and excessive resource consumption are at its basis. It reveals how the leisure of the upper classes is undergirded by social structures that reinforce inequality and perpetuate extractive attitudes toward local communities and environments.
The rich discourse offered by White Lotus urges viewers to be conscious of the space they take up, both socially and environmentally. This type of awareness is at the core of sustainable tourism and ecotourism trends over the past few decades, reflecting a growing desire among tourists—especially luxury tourists—to engage more ethically and meaningfully with their travel destinations. Nations across the world have historically relied on the tourism industry to support local economies and livelihoods, however, this support has also come at the expense of communities in different ways, some of which are highlighted in the series. Many popular destinations have faced overcrowding in the past decade, an effect aggravated by social media, producing a strain on local infrastructures and resources, and often outpricing locals and marginalizing their concerns while catering to those of tourists. The series of European cruise ship protests that took place in 2024 were organized by environmental organizations and groups of alienated locals seeking to limit overtourism, leading Amsterdam to consider banning cruise ships in their ports.
Sustainable tourism aims to address the blindspots of tourism, often highlighting the ways these blindspots are systemically created through the active prioritization of consumer desires over local lives and livelihoods. In some cases, the marginalization of these people and environments is compounded by historic structures of racism and colonialism. While big businesses and powerful white executives profit off of the tourism industry, local populations may live with their basic needs unmet, bearing the brunt of tourism’s costs and hardly seeing benefits. Sustainable tourism involves restructuring the economy of tourism to prioritize and direct profits toward lasting development in these communities and responding to unmet needs. This includes limiting the scale of tourism to ease strain on the community and environment. Ecotourism, an environmentally-centric cousin to sustainable tourism, directs these profits into ecological conservation, environmental education, and greener infrastructures and practices.
While these shifts in the tourism industry can be facilitated by evolving self-awareness and growing desire for sustainability among tourists, meaningful change is made on the industry side. In Destination Anthropocene, Amelia Moore documents the development of sustainable tourism and ecotourism in the Bahamas and the expert rebranding that was involved in this shift. Her incisive ethnography reveals the social and environmental relationships at the base of the tourism industry, but more importantly, how they are manipulated to construct consumer desire. In one chapter, she describes how a surplus of invasive lionfish in fishermen’s nets led to the inventive solution of incorporating lionfish into luxury dining for tourists. While lionfish are not a traditional part of Bahamian cuisine, this creative solution speaks to the ability to manipulate tourist appetites to address local environmental concerns like invasive species and the harm they cause to ecological thriving. Moreover, this shift required no ecological awareness on the tourists’ part but instead achieved sustainability goals through purposeful advertising.
Constructing consumer desires is not only a feature of ecotourism but an essential driving force behind tourism and all consumer industries. Knowing how this industry manipulates consumers by strategically positioning what is seen as desirable—destinations, experiences, products—makes it possible to criticize the choices of businesses when it comes to sustainable and unsustainable tourism practices. So then how can we explain why a TV show known for its self-aware class satire and critical portrayal of luxury tourism has actually played a large part in increasing tourist traffic to filming locations. The Maui resort that served as the set for season 1 experienced a 386% increase in availability checks after the release of the season, and the Sicilian resort featured in season 2 was booked out for months after its release. While TV and film have long motivated tourism, the booms experienced as a result of The White Lotus were not simply a secondary effect but an intention of the series by design. This phenomenon is so pronounced that it has been coined the “White Lotus effect.”
Each of the resorts featured in the series is owned by The Four Seasons, a luxury hotel company with over 100 locations worldwide. After the show was renewed for a third season, locations vied to be chosen as its backdrop, aware that this would function as an advertisement for their luxury accommodations. Forking over $4 million in incentives to HBO, the company’s Koh Samui resort was chosen. Preparation for the third season was soon underway, in collaboration with the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Not only were businesses aware of the financial benefits of television features but an entire apparatus was built around taking advantage of the anticipated waves of tourists.
Given White Lotus’s acute awareness of social systems of exploitation and the ills of the tourism industry, we may expect that their partnerships with the Four Seasons would seek to channel funds back into the local community, avoiding the neglectful and exploitative business it sharply critiques. However, not far from the tranquil blue beaches and luxurious resorts on Koh Samui, the island’s local population faces both a water crisis and a waste crisis. In the wake of global climate change, water resources on the island exhausted by resorts and tourist development are not able to replenish themselves. As a result, the island is primarily supplied with water through an underseas pipeline. After the local garbage plant fell into disrepair, waste began accumulating in some of the island’s landfills, wreaking environmental havoc. This effect has been amplified by the wastes of the tourist industry. Though resorts like Koh Samui’s Four Seasons play a part in exhausting local infrastructures and resources, they do little to address the problems they create in surrounding environments and communities, and it is unlikely that this pattern will change with new waves of tourism.
Though individual consumers can make travel choices that minimize social and environmental harm—and support local economies in meaningful ways instead of increasing the profits of big businesses—it is the systems of advertisement that determine tourism patterns by design. Whether tourist behavior brings harm or good is largely a matter of businesses’ commitment to financially supporting local communities and environments and finding creative solutions to specific problems (like the invasive lionfish in the Bahamas). Part of the problem is an awareness gap about the industry’s impacts. With recent headlines broadcasting resistance movements against overtourism and shows like the White Lotus, critical attitudes toward tourism have evidently become a part of mainstream discourse. Many wealthy and savvy consumers now seek out more ethical and eco-conscious travel opportunities. For all that we acknowledge the harm that has been built into the tourism industry, achieving greater sustainability is a matter of businesses putting their money where their mouth is instead of their own pockets. Businesses can move toward sustainable tourism and away from the current system of extraction, exploitation, and neglect by putting profits back into local environments and working toward co-management with communities. Only then can they make a positive impact, instead of turning the places that people hold sacred into a playground for the upper classes.