This article was originally published by Grist.
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.
