The third season of The White Lotus has dropped today.
While fans are preparing to obsess over the plot twists, complex characters, and clever themes, there’s one element that’s just as captivating – the location.
This time, the picturesque island of Koh Samui in Thailand takes centre stage, following in the footsteps of previous season hotspots like Maui and Taormina.
How White Lotus makes its filming locations the main character
On Monday afternoon’s episode of The Briefing, we sat down with Australian Traveller’s Quentin Long to talk about the“White Lotus effect”, and what happens to a location when an insanely popular show makes it look so attractive.
As has become tradition with the show, the location is not just a backdrop – it is almost a character in its own right.
The Four Seasons Maui, for example, saw a 425 per cent increase in website visits after the premiere of Season One.
While Sicily experienced a 350 per cent spike in searches during Season Two.
Long explained that aspiration plays a key role in shaping people’s ideas about travel and tourism, particularly for a”hotel-centric” show like The White Lotus.
“When you get to much more destination-driven things like Sex and the City, or like Game of Thrones, for example, those sorts of things, whether it is about the destination. That aspiration is very much part of the whole experience and actuallyleads to tourism booms that are beyond just the single property,” he said.
But while the show’s success is undoubtedly beneficial for the tourism industry, it raises an important question: Whatimpact is the rise in tourism having on the local communities?
“In reality, what we end up with is some destinations that go too far in the over tours and end up in over tourism and degraded and other destinations that are actually holding that back,” Long said.
Long noted that the movie effect has had a significant impact on local economies.
“The beauty of visitor economies is that they are regeneration in terms of the fact that you can sell that bedroom 365 days a year this year, next year and forever. And so that’s really, really helpful.”
He mentioned that the Indonesian Government is currently developing seven other destinations similar to Bali, applying the lessons learned from Bali to guide their future decisions.
“It becomes destination culture and putting those together actually is what tourists [and] travellers are looking for. We’ve been doing it for a long time.”
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