Thanks to HBO, everyone wants a White Lotus getaway. Can Thailand handle it? todayheadline

Season 3 of the hit HBO show White Lotus premiered this week, opening on a gnarled branch in a dense jungle, the camera tracking upward before landing on a monkey, perched attentively. The shot establishes nature as a primary theme that continues as we watch this season’s guests arrive, then disperse into villas cascading down a lush Thai hillside, each of them afforded ravishing views over a seemingly pristine island and sea. 

In real life, this resort is the Four Seasons Koh Samui, and thanks to both its visual appeal and the popularity of the show, Thailand is anticipating a major tourism boost.

The country has experienced the power of appearing on screens across the globe before. At the dawn of the new millennium, the film The Beach premiered, starring Leonardo DiCaprio at his post-Titanic peak as well as the setting itself — the otherworldly Maya Bay, a nearly enclosed slice of the Andaman Sea on the uninhabited island of Phi Phi Leh, inside a national park. It was a popular snorkeling spot before The Beach, but the film supercharged interest and fans began flocking to Maya Bay, with upwards of 5,000 tourists and 200 boats overwhelming the small beach and its marine ecosystem every day. 

The country went along with it, caught in the all-too-common trap of depending on revenue from the very tourism that jeopardizes its infrastructure and environment. Meanwhile, trash wrecked the beach, boat anchors and pollution killed the reef, and wildlife disappeared. 

Now, 25 years later almost to the day after The Beach came along, Thailand has its next Hollywood-induced frenzy on its hands, and it’s hoping to be better prepared this time around.

While The Beach portrayed paradise-seekers rejecting the traditional markers of vacation luxury by starting their own commune on a secret beach, White Lotus showcases those very markers, then lampoons them. Each season ushers in a new set of wealthy malcontents and the locals who make their holidays run smoothly. Both productions share a sense of paradise gone wrong. They in fact skewer the very notion of the beach as paradise, which would seem to make them awkward conduits for selling a location. Yet, a marketing budget can’t buy the kind of promotion they’ve provided. 

“Appearing in White Lotus Season 3 allows us to reach a truly global audience,” said Chompu Marusachot, the New York director of the Tourist Authority of Thailand. “We are continuously striving to enhance and expand our tourism efforts and infrastructure to welcome even more visitors in the future.” 

But as Maya Bay showed, more tourists can mean more problems. In 2018, the Thai government had finally seen enough and shut the place down until further notice. Maya Bay reopened in 2022 with a strict system in place to minimize future damage. Boats are no longer allowed to enter the bay, docking instead at a pier elsewhere on the island. The new maximum of 4,125 daily visitors, arriving in designated time slots, walk along a new boardwalk to reach the bay, where they can no longer swim or bring non-reef-safe sunscreen. Maya Bay continues to close to visitors for two months every year for rehabilitation. 

Koh Samui, by contrast, has been home to a bustling tourism industry long before White Lotus. Today it has 630 hotels and resorts. One of them, the Four Seasons, opened in 2007 and occupies a relatively serene stretch of coastline compared to other parts of the island, whose 3.5 million annual visitors join a local population of 70,000. 

Both locations are dealing with the challenges of climate change. Last year, Thailand suffered record high sea temperatures, which led to a mass coral bleaching event and the death of seagrass, which in turn led to a mass die-off of dugongs and other ocean life. Storms and floods are also getting more destructive. In 2024, Thailand experienced its worst flooding in decades, affecting more than half a million households.

Koh Samui is a case study in how tourism can add to those problems. “Since tourism rapidly developed without proper infrastructure planning and environmental management, Samui is facing critical problems in terms of waste management and water resources,” said Kannapa Pongponrat, a professor at Thailand’s Thammasat University.  

The pipeline bringing water from the mainline to Koh Samui has proved insufficient as tourism has grown, leading to water shortages on the island. Sediment from construction of resorts and hotels has damaged coral reefs and other ocean life. And trash often accumulates at the edges of roads and in the ocean itself. Thailand is one of the world’s biggest contributors to marine plastic pollution, with tourism having been identified as the primary source of the problem in the Gulf of Thailand, where Koh Samui is located.      

The Thai government nevertheless worked hard to woo creator Mike White’s juggernaut of a show, offering generous tax breaks and other incentives that ultimately shaved as much as $4.4 million from production costs for White Lotus’ third season. The payoff? A near guarantee of more tourism revenue. After Season 2 aired in 2022, the Four Seasons’ San Domenico Palace, Taormina, which stood in for the White Lotus resort, sold out for all of 2023, while travel interest for Sicily spiked. The Four Seasons Maui, the setting for Season 1, saw a 425 percent increase in traffic to its website after the show aired. A representative for the Four Seasons on Koh Samui said that since being announced as the “White Lotus” for Season 3, the hotel has already experienced a surge in searches and bookings.

As the country seeks to increase tourism, plans are underway to begin construction on a cruise ship terminal for Koh Samui in 2029. An airport expansion is set to start this year. New hotel development continues apace. A second waterline from the mainland is being built.

At the same time, the government has taken steps to mitigate environmental impacts over the past decade or so. The 2015 Marine and Coastal Resources Management Act has been harnessed to ban harmful activities such as the discharge of wastewater into the ocean and “sea walking,” where tourists stroll the ocean floor hooked up to oxygen-fed helmets. The country’s Roadmap on Plastic Waste Management aims to reduce plastic use and increase recycling practices. All the way back in 2014, the government launched the “Save Water, Save Samui” campaign to encourage sustainable water use on the island. 

According to experts, though, these efforts are sometimes toothless. “The Thai government has laws and regulations,” said Suchana Apple Chavanich, professor of oceanography at Thailand’s Chulalongkorn University, “but in this case they need to make sure that those laws and regulations will be followed.” The plastic waste roadmap, for example, does not include an enforcement mechanism, likely limiting its effectiveness. Pongponrat pointed to unchecked illegal construction on Koh Samui, often with insufficient water drainage, which exacerbates flooding problems.

Chavanich also noted that many hotels and other tourist businesses on Koh Samui have been working independently to make Koh Samui greener over the past decade or so, but these efforts in turn could use more government support. “This has to be a collaboration between [the Thai] government, local government, public and private sectors,” she said. 

For its part, the Four Seasons said it has embarked on a number of initiatives. It eliminated all single-use plastic in 2019, treats its graywater on property, and partnered with Thailand’s Department of Marine and Coastal Resources on a reef conservation project that has so far reintroduced 16,000 coral pieces to the reef offshore from the resort. The resort said it is developing additional sustainability measures in light of the expected White Lotus effect, but was unable to provide detail at this time as plans are still being approved. 

Experts agreed that more action will be necessary to counterbalance the damage from overtourism on Koh Samui. The crowds are coming, proving that even as climate change and rising seas threaten the entire model of the beach vacation, its cultural cachet endures. Three seasons in, White Lotus is featuring nature prominently, but always with ominous overtones — the fruit of a pong pong tree in one villa turns out to be toxic, a large monitor lizard spooks one of the guests. It’s almost as if the island is trying to send a message. A quarter century after The Beach, whether that message will be received remains an open question.