I love HBO’s The White Lotus with its compellingly awful characters on vacation in obscenely expensive resorts.

Welcome to Koh Samui: season three of The White Lotus is set in Thailand.Credit: HBO

The show satirises conspicuous consumption and the dark side of tourism, showing how the luxury veneer sits upon an underbelly of entitlement and privilege, neocolonialism, corruption of sexuality and spiritual appropriation. All the guests are of questionable morality, and each island is somewhat corrupted by their presence.

Well, that’s what I think it’s about but I’m not sure others are getting the same message. Because all three series have dramatically increased tourism to the islands where they are set – Maui, Sicily and now Koh Samui. Thailand lobbied to be the setting for series three because of this “White Lotus effect”. There’s even a line of merchandise that cashes in on its cachet, including a cocktail book, beds and a luggage range.

I suppose hypocrisy is the greatest luxury, after all.

I love the show for skewering the filthy rich (as one character says, “most rich people are trashy”), but we are all compromised. The current series explores wellness and spirituality. Before I set out to the spiritual supermarket of India, where I wrote Holy Cow, I came to this part of Thailand as........

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