On overtourism and preventing it, attracting tourism and changing it

A roundup of my recent work: on White Lotus for Grist, Ghent vs. overtourism for CityLab, and redefining the beach of paradise for the NY Times

A scene from White Lotus Season 3

The last half of February has to be the month during which residents of the American north daydream most about hot weather. Nary a one of us isn’t thinking how nice it would feel to be seeking some shade while sporting a tank top, or maybe washing away a sweaty brow with a plunge into a sizeable body of water. Smart move on the part of HBO’s schedulers, then, to premiere Season 3 of White Lotus on February 16^th. Watching it is the kind of exquisite torture we winter-bound souls are most susceptible to right about now.

As always, watching it has me thinking about the very human contradictions that the show exposes. For two seasons, we had a through-line in the form of Jennifer Coolidge playing Tanya McQuoid, a lonely alcoholic heiress who doesn’t trust herself but desperately wants to trust someone else. Tanya’s just the first in a parade of luxuriously rich people you wouldn’t want to be. There’s also the guy who can’t enjoy having only the second-biggest suite at the resort, the college girls and best friends who don’t understand that they hate each other, the newly minted tech millionaire couple realizing they were happier when they were poorer. The list goes on.

We wouldn’t want to trade lives with any of these people, but what White Lotus exploits so well is our desire to go on their vacations anyway. (We’ve seen this phenomenon before: A hundred years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby and in the century since, its biting critique of the capitalist ideal has taken a backseat to the glamour in which that critique came packaged. White Lotus may show beach tourism in a negative light, but the polish of it all wins out.)

As a result, additional crowds are likely to descend on Thailand’s Koh Samui, where the Four Seasons stood in for the resort of the show this time around.

For Grist, I looked into whether Thailand is ready for the onslaught. (The verdict? Probably not.)

In Grist: Thanks to HBO, Everyone Wants a ‘White Lotus’ Getaway. Can Thailand Handle It?

Now, 25 years later almost to the day after The Beach came along, Thailand has its next Hollywood-induced frenzy on its hands, and it’s hoping to be better prepared this time around.

While The Beach portrayed paradise-seekers rejecting the traditional markers of vacation luxury by starting their own commune on a secret beach, White Lotus showcases those very markers, then lampoons them. Each season ushers in a new set of wealthy malcontents and the locals who make their holidays run smoothly. Both productions share a sense of paradise gone wrong. They in fact skewer the very notion of the beach as paradise, which would seem to make them awkward conduits for selling a location. Yet, a marketing budget can’t buy the kind of promotion they’ve provided.

[Read the full article here]

I also chatted with my editor at Grist, Claire Thompson, for its newsletter ‘Looking Forward,’ about what it might take to create a truly sustainable tourism industry—you can read that here.

And speaking of readiness for tourism…I also recently turned my attention to the city of Ghent, Belgium as it works to cultivate its tourism industry without descending into the scourge of overtourism that so many other Eueopean cities are struggling with.

It’s a topic I explored in depth in a piece for Bloomberg CityLab as Ghent is becoming an increasingly popular destination with travelers. We hear a lot about the cities trying to reverse overtourism once it takes hold, but far less about the ways it could be prevented in the first place…

In CityLab: As Visitors Discover Ghent, the City Is Trying to Prevent a Tourism Takeover

Ghent certainly has the goods for a robust tourism industry. One of the most important cities in Europe during the Middle Ages, it boasts a well-preserved historic core at the confluence of the Lys and Scheldt rivers, full of ornate centuries-old buildings that host flourishing dining, drinking and arts scenes. With 270,000 residents — plus 50,000 students at Ghent University — it’s a compact, walkable city of art-filled museums, churches and landmarks like the hulking 12th century Castle of the Counts, and an easy trip from other cities in Europe.

But locals are increasingly ambivalent about the influx of visitors. A 2023 survey of 1,779 Ghent residents found just half agreeing that “in general, the benefits of tourism outweigh the disadvantages.” Still, nearly two-thirds want tourism to remain important, and well over half believe tourism makes their city more vibrant, although that percentage has been slipping since the first such survey in 2017.

[Read the full article here]

All of this said, players within the tourism industry do enact tangible positive change from time to time, and sometimes it adds up to something bigger. To wit: For the New York Times I wrote about some of the many beach resorts around the world that have become stewards of their coastlines as nature intended, rather than shoving them into the template of palm trees/white sandy-bottomed beaches that has reigned over beach tourism for the past 75 or so years. In doing so, they’re helping to change our understanding of what makes a beach beautiful…

In the NY Times: Your Resort’s ‘Perfect Beach’ Is a Lie (gifted link)

Onshore, the coconut palm is almost ubiquitous, and it does offer some benefits. Coconuts are exquisite natural containers of water and food, with fibers that can be used for rope and woven goods.

But on modern shorelines, these trees do little to prevent sand erosion or block wind and they provide scant shade, an increasingly valuable commodity in a warming world. They are also nonnative to many of the world’s most popular beach destinations. When Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the Americas, on an island today that is part of the Bahamas, there were no coconut palms in the Caribbean. Europeans would bring them later.

[Read the full article here]

As always, thanks for reading. I’ll be back soon with more writing and reporting, including efforts to parse what’s happening to travel infrastructure in the US as the new presidential administration progresses.