If you can afford to travel overseas, you’re rich

There’s a thing that is supposed to happen when you watch The White Lotus. You’re supposed to want to go there.

The popular HBO series is the latest example of a travel trend known as “set-jetting”, whereby travellers are inspired to visit gorgeous locations they’ve seen on screen. That’s why Taormina in Sicily has been swamped by tourists keen to recreate experiences from the lust-filled season 2 (and who are no doubt disappointed to find that “popping down” to the beach from the San Domenico Palace hotel is a 15-minute drive).

Taormina in Sicily was swamped with tourists after the destination was used for The White Lotus.

The Four Seasons resort in Maui has picked up its share of extra visitors thanks to season one, while the Four Seasons Koh Samui is experiencing a huge bounce after featuring as the setting for season three of The White Lotus, which recently finished being screened.

And there’s no doubt these places are beautiful and beautifully shot.

But there’s a strange disconnect here, because The White Lotus, if you’re paying attention, should have the opposite effect. You shouldn’t want to go to these resorts. You should want to avoid resorts forever. And any sort of luxury hotel. And possibly travel as a whole.

The White Lotus is about power: those who have it and those who don’t.Credit: AP

Let me explain. The White Lotus is about power, among other things. It’s about those who have it and those who do not. And in the chosen setting for this series, those who have power are the rich hotel guests, and those who do not are the residents who serve them in the guise of hospitality.

The series expertly and searingly strips bare the power structures of modern tourism. It lets you laugh at the hubris and the snobbishness and the awfulness of rich tourists in fancy hotels before something terrible happens and you realise that that’s all of us, in some way.

Because most travellers from Australia know that you don’t have to consider yourself rich to find yourself in a power imbalance when you travel. Compared to much of the rest of the world, if you can afford to travel, you are rich. And many of those people you encounter when you leave Australia are not.

It’s pretty clear that this power imbalance and the advantages we take from it is not confined to high-end tourism. It happens everywhere, from the cheap-as-chips guesthouse in Vietnam to the safari camp in Botswana to the high-end hotel in Taormina. There are the servants and the served. The haves and the have-nots.

Ralph Fiennes with Anya Taylor-Joy in The Menu.

We tourists tell ourselves stories about the smiling, happy locals who don’t need anything more so we don’t have to think too deeply about the wild financial and social imbalance at play here, and the fact we’re doing very little to change it, because it’s to our benefit.

In that way, The White Lotus is a lot like The Menu, the biting satire of fine-dining that made me think so differently about the high-end food experiences I’m sometimes able to have around the world. This whole thing is a farce, you realise. It’s ridiculous.

Luxury resorts are the same. I am very privileged in this job as a travel writer to stay in some places that I, some chump from central Queensland, really have no right to have access to. And now those incredible – and incredibly expensive – resorts are ruined.

There’s a popular sub-Reddit – 24 million members and counting – called Am I The Asshole? in which people write about a tricky social situation they’re in and then ask that question of readers.

And in this situation, yes: I, the guest at these beautiful resorts, am.

Unfortunately, much like The Menu, it’s not just your opinion of yourself that changes after watching The White Lotus. Obviously, I suspect myself of being a massive wanker. But now I also suspect that my fellow resort guests fit neatly into that category. This whole ecosystem is questionable.

I stayed in a very expensive resort in northern Argentina recently and listened uncomfortably as my guide talked to me about the Guarani people, the indigenous inhabitants of the area, many of whom now live in abject poverty so close to those fancy hotels.

“They’re quite primitive,” she said, “but if you look closely at their huts you will see a TV antenna on the top. Some of them have mobile phones. So they’re just like us, really. Do you still have natives in Australia?”

Am I the asshole? I certainly feel like it now.

Travel is a complicated thing, and not one you can summarise in a single idea. Those fancy resorts create employment, they prop up entire communities in some places, and they do good for the places they exist in, particularly if they’re locally owned. The travel industry can be vital to entire nations’ economies.

Move around the world in the right way and you as a tourist can do plenty of good while also really enjoying yourself. You can meet people from all walks of life, swap ideas, transfer wealth, and gain a far better knowledge of yourself and your place in the world.

All of that is true. But still, if watching The White Lotus makes you want to go on a “set-jetting” holiday, you’re probably missing the point.