The spotlight
This weekend, the much-anticipated third season of the HBO show White Lotus dropped its first episode. The show famously shows a dark side of tourism, illustrating the class divides between wealthy Westerners who travel to high-end resorts oozing with entitlement and the locals whose livelihoods depend on catering to their needs.
Despite that, each season of the show has supercharged tourism to the locations featured. In a story for Grist published today, Sarah Stodola explores how Koh Samui, the island off the coast of Thailand that’s the locale for Season 3, is preparing for the challenges that may bring.
Even without the boost of the show, tourism to Koh Samui — Thailand’s second-largest island and a popular travel destination — has been in conflict with the island’s natural beauty, Stodola writes. The local population of 70,000 is dwarfed by annual visitors in the millions, and the sheer volume of visitors means that local water resources are constrained, waste management is a growing problem, and construction has damaged the nearby reef and other ecosystems.
It’s a similar story in many other parts of the world, where communities have become dependent on tourism dollars while suffering from the impacts of overtourism. But there are many ways the industry can be improved from a sustainability and equity perspective, says Stodola — who wrote a book about the beach resort economy and its future on a climate-changed planet, and also writes a Substack newsletter deconstructing travel and tourism.
She pointed to places where governments have limited the overall flow of tourism, as well as companies, like hotels, that have taken on a responsibility to prioritize the needs and well-being of the local community they’re coming into. “I think that’s key to having a successful tourism industry,” Stodola said.
She cited one example of a high-end resort, NIHI Sumba, that created a tourism industry on an Indonesian island that had high rates of malaria. “They gave mosquito nets to the entire community, and malaria deaths have decreased exponentially in the population around that resort,” Stodola said. “So that’s a really positive outcome.”
But she also said better tourism might mean changing the very concept of tourism itself. “I think, partially, travelers have gotten away from expecting to have to adapt somewhat to a place,” Stodola said. Luxury hotels and all-inclusive resorts can create a kind of bubble that makes it unnecessary to, say, learn about local customs or even a few words of a language. “Shifting that mindset to expect to have to kind of assimilate into the place that you’re going, rather than the other way around, would be a really big positive,” she said.
In the Q&A below, I talked to Stodola about how governments and the private sector can work together to redesign an approach to tourism that is sustainable, economically beneficial, and tailored to the unique needs and priorities of a particular place.
Q. You’ve covered travel and tourism a lot — including some of the positive things that they can accomplish. But in your newsletter, you also talk about how travel is not inherently a good thing. Can you tell me a little more about that?
A. Right. My background was kind of doing more kind of conventional travel writing, up until the past five or six years. And I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable with how positive, as a default, the coverage always was. There was just this assumption that it was a great thing.
And it is a great thing — travel and tourism do have the capacity to be really good, positive forces in the world. But like anything else, they can be positive or negative. And I do think the tide is turning now that overtourism is becoming so widely covered. But I think, up until recently, places that were cultivating new tourism industries did kind of get blinded by the revenue that it created for them, and any other impacts that were negative were always kind of taking a backseat to this economic potential that they saw.
Q. The capitalism of it all.
A. The capitalism of it all.
Q. So, can you expand a little bit on what you think the good parts of travel and tourism are? Can it be a good thing for the planet?
A. The way it’s structured right now, no. I mean, obviously this is a complicated topic, but the way it’s structured right now, so much of tourism is fundamentally based on taking a long-haul flight. And as long as that is the case, and as long as long-haul flights are as environmentally damaging as they are, then from a baseline, no.
But then, if you dig down deeper, there are players within the tourism industry that are doing good things on a more localized level. I have seen certain resorts or certain hotels that are helping to expand knowledge about how to preserve ecosystems. There are elements of it that can be positive.
Q. Are there any examples that come to mind of places you’ve encountered that are doing it right? What can that look like?
A. I don’t think that a tourism industry can be done sustainably or done responsibly without heavy government involvement. Because like you said, left to the capitalism of it all, I think the environment and the local populations kind of lose out every time.
With the Thailand example, I think the government has shown good intentions. But the sense that I’m getting from everybody I talk to is that they have enforcement issues. They’re aware of problems, they pass regulations, but they don’t really have a system of enforcement in place to make sure that everything they want to see happening is happening.
One of the things that I think that all locations should be doing as they’re growing their tourism industry right now is determining the ideal level of tourism, or the ideal number of tourists for their location based on, how big is the local population, what can the environment there handle. It’s something that places just don’t seem to be doing, and to me it seems like such an obvious benchmark that they should be working with from the outset.
Looking at Koh Samui, almost all of their water comes from this pipeline from the mainland that has a very clear capacity — it was very clear that at some point, growing this tourism industry, they weren’t going to have the water capacity for all the people on that island at any one time. And now they don’t. And they have water shortages. That’s such a clear example — they could have determined how many people they can handle on the island with the amount of water capacity that they have, and worked within those boundaries.
There’s an archipelago very far off the coast of Brazil called Fernando de Noronha, and they have built a tourism industry, but from the very outset, they limited the number of daily tourists that can be on the island at somewhere around 400. They came up with this number that seemed right for the economic benefit and then balancing that with environmental preservation, and it’s been super successful.
Of course, it’s a lot easier to implement those kinds of limits when you’re a remote island — a lot easier than someplace where you can’t really control the transportation to and from quite as carefully.
Q. One I did want to come back to — you brought up the issue of long-distance flights, and the unavoidably huge amount of carbon emissions that comes from long-distance travel. Do you see more regional and local travel as part of what the future of sustainable tourism could look like?
A. One hundred percent, I do. Especially when we’re talking about something like beach tourism — and this is a problem that’s probably going to happen as a result of White Lotus in Thailand, a lot of Americans are now going to be heading over in greater numbers to Thailand to do a beach vacation. And I don’t think most people going halfway around the world for a beach vacation are necessarily really interacting with the culture that they’re finding themselves in.
It’s an argument I’ve made before. I think, especially the bigger hotel companies that have resorts all around the world, I would argue that they should be marketing in a more regionally focused way, instead of marketing globally and trying to get people to fly halfway around the world for their beach vacation. That is one area in particular where a lot of long-haul flights could be cut.
Q. Is there anything else you see as a top priority in your vision for the future of sustainable tourism?
A. I think always prioritizing the local communities over the tourists is an important rule of thumb. I think a lot of places have gotten away from that and prioritized the tourists over the locals. I would like to see a shift back to that where, if you want to go to this place, you’re going to their community and their culture — they don’t have a responsibility to recreate your culture and comfort for you. I think that probably would have a trickle-down effect and solve a lot of other problems.
— Claire Elise Thompson
More exposure
A parting shot
As Stodola describes in her feature, Thailand has experienced a similar Hollywood-driven tourism craze in the past. When the movie The Beach came out 25 years ago, it led to overtourism (and destruction) on Maya Bay, an enclosed beach in a national park on the uninhabited island of Phi Phi Leh. Things got so bad that the government closed the beach completely and reopened it four years later with strict regulations. This image shows boats right up at the boundary line in 2019, when the park was closed to visitors.
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Claire Elise Thompson grist.org
