More White Lotus? Nah, I’m tired of the rich behaving badly on holiday

It seems we can’t get enough of rich people behaving badly on holiday.

Even though the latest season of The White Lotus has finished, the conversation about it hasn’t quite died out yet.

I just received an email from a hotel PR spruiking resorts in Asia: “While we wait in limbo for season 4 of The White Lotus to take hold of our lives again, I thought I’d help fill the void,” they wrote.

I’m not in limbo. Are you?

But apparently, many are, which is why we’re about to endure months of speculation on where the next season will be set.

As a travel writer, entitled The White Lotus characters are all-too familiar.

All anyone can say is that it needs to be where there’s a Four Seasons hotel, due to the producers’ partnership with that hotel group.

I really don’t care. While the first season of TWL brilliantly skewered the relationship between entitled travellers and the hapless Hawaiian locals they exploited in various ways, subsequent seasons have been less sharp in their satire.

Season 2, set in Sicily’s Taormina, was entertaining enough, although I feel for that lovely Sicilian village, which is already crowded enough with cruise ship tourists. But season 3 filmed in Thailand proved to be a humid, claustrophobic bore, with an unsatisfactory shoot-em-up denouement.

I became quickly tired of its cast of privileged travellers, who were a miserable lot with one or two exceptions. The most likeable characters are always the ones who see grim ends.

On the scale of adorability, none of the characters could hold a candle to Thurston Howell III and his wife Lovey from Gilligan’s Island.

The 1964 television series about seven castaways on a tropical island was the first show I can recall that made fun of rich people finding themselves out of their comfort zone and continuing to act with entitlement, oblivious to their level of privilege.

The rich and oblivious Thurston Howell III with Lovey Howell, left, and Ginger on the television series Gilligan’s Island. Credit: CBS via Getty Images

Castaways Thurston and his ditsy wife continue to regard their fellow travellers – the Movie Star, The Professor and Mary Ann – as social inferiors while marooned on the island, and much hilarity arises from the fact that he never realises his fortune is worthless on the strip of sand.

Before Gilligan’s Island, plenty of obnoxious and nutty rich people populated movies, especially the screwball comedies of the ’30s and ’40s – films such as My Man Godfrey, Topper, The Palm Beach Story, It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story.

The boorish rich have always been sitting ducks for satire, but in recent years there’s been a rush to lampoon them.

Perhaps this is because there are more ultra-rich than ever? In Australia, the number of ultra-high-net-worth people (defined as having a net worth of more than $300 million) rose 2.9 per cent from 2022 to 2023 to reach 15,347 people, according to the Knight Frank Wealth Report 2024. That number is expected to rise a further 27 per cent by 2028.

The Greed is Good generation is back.

Globally, there were 626,619 ultra-rich in 2023. I expect there are many more now.

That’s a lot of rich travellers. Only a minority will behave badly, of course.

But yachts are getting bigger and small planes getting more luxurious and hotel suites and villas more extravagant than ever to attract this crowd.

While many travellers worry about their carbon footprint and tightening their belts, others are flaunting their wealth, 1980s style. The Greed is Good generation is back, unrestrained.

I suppose then that it’s natural for the 99 per cent to want to get even.

If you like anti-capitalist, left-leaning Eat the Rich shows and movies like TWL, you’ll probably enjoy The Menu, about diners lured to a pretentious restaurant on a private island helmed by a demented chef, and A Bigger Splash, about rich guests gathered at a villa on Pantelleria, a Sicilian island.

Both are black comedies starring Ralph Fiennes and both involve grotesque, despicable behaviour and death.

My personal favourite is Triangle of Sadness, about two young influencers who join wealthy passengers, including a Russian oligarch and a pair of arms manufacturers, on a luxury cruise. Striking storms and pirates, the yacht is wrecked on a remote island. Unlike Gilligan’s Island, the tables turn when the cleaning woman usurps command.

It’s so over-the-top (be alerted) that people walked out of the cinema during screenings. But I found many of the characters all too recognisable from my travels.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the rich who get their comeuppance in TWL are not necessarily uber-rich, just privileged – which many of us who travel indeed are.

Be careful what you mock because the writers might be after us next season.