When life imitates art

Resorts featured in The White Lotus can count on waving hello to more new visitors.

The widespread popularity of HBO’s hit TV show – set at a different high-class resort each season – is spurring a huge surge in tourism to those locations, in a phenomenon travel agents have dubbed the “White Lotus Effect.”

• Hawaii’s Four Seasons Maui at Wailea, where Season 1 was shot, experienced a 425% annual increase in website visits and a 386% bump in availability checks after the show first aired in 2021.
• Season 2’s setting, San Domenico Palace in Taormina, Italy, sold out for several months after the show debuted in October 2022. Additionally, searches for hotels and flights to Sicily from the US increased 50+% while Season 2 was airing.

The latest season is no different. Though Season 3 still has six episodes left, bookings at Thailand’s Four Seasons Resort Koh Samui have already jumped 40% since it started airing. Overall, Thailand’s director of tourism predicts a 20% rise in visitors this year as a result of the country being featured on The White Lotus.

✈️ Zoom out: The trend of “set-jetting,” or traveling to destinations where TV shows and movies were filmed, has grown increasingly commonplace. It earned a designation from Expedia as one of its top travel trends of 2024, with popular destinations including the London suburb where Ted Lasso was filmed and areas of Norway featured in Succession.