Is The White Lotus skewering privilege or promoting luxury holidays?

Despite its critique of luxe travel and the rich, HBO show has become a powerful marketing tool – look at where the third season was filmed

Reading Time:4 minutes

Aimee Lou Wood in a scene from The White Lotus. Despite its critique of luxe travel and the rich, the show has become a powerful marketing tool for tourism. Photo: HBO via AP

Published: 7:15am, 5 Mar 2025Updated: 7:46am, 5 Mar 2025

When it premiered in 2021, The White Lotus set out to skewer high-end tourism and the elite one-percenters willing to pay US$9,000 a night to relax.

Written and directed by Mike White, the darkly comic mystery followed the entitled guests and beleaguered employees at a luxurious Maui hotel, in Hawaii, over the course of an increasingly tense week.

A destination that was supposed to be a refuge from the world’s problems instead became a microcosm for them, a place where the class divide and legacy of American imperialism were on vivid display.

The White Lotus, which filmed its first season on location at the Four Seasons in Maui, somehow made an exclusive resort seem like a toxic pressure cooker. Working there was not just soul-crushing, it could even kill you. Season two of the HBO show, a bedroom farce set at a gorgeous beachfront resort in Sicily, in Italy, looked at sex, money and power.

Natasha Rothwell in a scene from The White Lotus. Photo: HBO/TNS

Both instalments lampooned the wealthy and depicted people dying under tragic circumstances in picturesque locations. And, perhaps counter-intuitively, both seasons led to a tourism boom in the filming locations. Somehow, a show that sharply critiqued luxury travel also functioned as a glossy advertisement for it.