About Travel Channel

Travel Channel

The Travel Channel, known in Chinese as Luyou Weishi or Tourism Satellite TV, was the name carried from 2002 to 2019 by the satellite channel of Hainan Television, based in Haikou, Hainan. The satellite service itself had launched in 1999, and its adoption of a tourism and leisure identity in 2002 made it the first channel of its kind in China — a specialised satellite service devoted to travel at a time when provincial satellite channels were almost all general entertainment services. In 2019 the Travel Channel name was retired and the service was revamped and renamed Hainan Satellite TV.

For seventeen years the channel was the television face of China's island province and of its tourism industry. It was operated not directly by the station alone but by a joint-venture company part-owned by a Hong Kong-listed media group, its advertising was sold under contracts worth hundreds of millions of yuan, and its history tracked the rise of Hainan itself, from resort island to the international tourism island project announced by the State Council in 2010.

Hainan Television, the parent station

Hainan Television was established in August 1982 and began broadcasting on 1 October 1984, before Hainan had even become a separate province. The station grew into the provincial broadcaster of the island, with five studios, two of them large spaces of 1,000 and 400 square metres. Its main comprehensive channel, HNTV-1, was accessible to about 7.5 million viewers and reached eighty-five per cent of the province, with spillover into parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Guangdong Province; on one occasion in 1990 the station was even picked up in Tokyo, Japan.

HNTV-1's major programmes included Hainan News Broadcast, News Weekly, Economy World, Hainan Island, TV Court and Sun Flower. A second, wired channel carried programmes including Tourism Information, an early sign of the tourism strand that would later define the satellite service, while a third wired channel carried general news and business information such as finance, stocks and real estate. It was on top of this local structure that the station built its satellite channel at the end of the 1990s.

Launch of the satellite service in 1999

Hainan's satellite channel was formally launched in 1999, a launch recorded in the broadcasting press of the time under the headline that China Satellite Television's Hainan station had officially gone on air. Satellite carriage lifted the Hainan service out of its island footprint for the first time: instead of serving only the province and its immediate neighbours across the Qiongzhou Strait, the channel could be distributed by cable systems across mainland China.

For its first three years the satellite service operated as a general provincial satellite channel. The decisive change came in 2002, when the station gave the channel a single, specialised identity built around the one industry in which Hainan had a claim no other province could match — tourism.

Becoming the Travel Channel in 2002

From 2002 the satellite channel was known as the Travel Channel, with an emphasis on tourism and leisure programming, and it was described as the first of its kind in China. It presented itself as the only specialised satellite television channel in the country with tourism and leisure as its main content approved by the national radio and television administration, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day. In its own descriptions, the channel claimed that its tourism programme share and its arrival rate ranked first among national satellite television, and that it had developed into one of the most influential satellite channels with a distinctive character, mixing diversified programme styles with specialised tourism programmes.

The positioning tied the channel to its home island. Hainan was China's tropical resort province, and Sanya, on its southern coast, had become the first Chinese city to host the Miss World pageant in 2003. A dedicated travel channel based in Haikou could sell the island to the whole country while also carrying travel programming from well beyond it — the channel's subject was tourism as such, not only Hainan tourism.

The operating company, Hainan Haishi

The Travel Channel was operated by Hainan Haishi Tourist Satellite TV Media Company, a joint venture rather than a simple station department. Hainan Television held a fifty per cent stake in Hainan Haishi. A further forty-nine per cent was held by Asian Union Film and Media, a jointly controlled entity of Media China Corporation, the Hong Kong-listed media group that described itself as a satellite channel operator and entertainment content provider in China.

That structure made the Travel Channel one of the more commercialised of China's provincial satellite services in the 2000s. The station contributed the channel licence, the brand and the Hainan base; the outside partner brought advertising sales machinery and entertainment industry connections. The arrangement was tested, and then restructured, in the advertising contracts that followed.

The exclusive advertising contracts, 2006 to 2009

On 12 May 2006 Hainan Haishi entered into an exclusive advertising agency agreement with Beijing Hua Yi Qian Si Advertising Company, known as Qiansi, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media China. Under the agreement Qiansi acted as the exclusive advertising agent for the Travel Channel. The annual agency fees set for 2008 and 2009 were 198 million yuan for each year — a measure of how valuable a national satellite channel's airtime had become, even for a specialist service.

The economics tightened at the end of the decade. In December 2009 Media China announced that Qiansi and Hainan Haishi had agreed to reduce the fees payable for 2008 and 2009 by fifty million yuan in total: the 2008 fee was adjusted down to 166 million yuan and the 2009 fee to 180 million yuan, substantially lowering the group's operating costs. Media China reported at the same time that revenue from its television advertising segment had reached about 107.74 million Hong Kong dollars in the first half of 2009, an increase of thirty-four per cent over the same period the year before, so the renegotiation took place against a growing, not a collapsing, advertising business.

The 2010 joint venture and the green channel

The December 2009 announcement also restructured the channel's future. Media China and a wholly owned subsidiary of Hainan Television formed a new joint venture that became the Travel Channel's exclusive advertising agent with effect from 1 January 2010, replacing the previous agency arrangement. Wang Ping, the former deputy chief editor of Hunan Satellite TV — one of China's most successful entertainment channels — was appointed general manager of the joint venture, in charge of the operation and advertising affairs of the Travel Channel. Media China said the venture would strengthen its long-term cooperation with Hainan TV and enhance the channel's operation, content production and advertising sales, and that the partners would explore business opportunities created by the government's plan to build Hainan into an international tourist destination.

That plan gave the channel its policy moment. In 2010 China's State Council decided to make Hainan an international tourism island, and the island's visitor numbers were climbing steeply — Sanya alone received some 12.3 million tourists in 2012, almost one hundred times the figure for 1987. The Travel Channel aligned itself with the environmental side of that project: in 2010 it took the lead among Chinese channels in launching the concept of a green channel, presenting tourism television as a promoter of low-carbon, ecological travel.

The channel in the 2010s

Through the 2010s the Travel Channel continued as Hainan Television's national satellite service while the station around it changed. Hainan TV added further services, including a news channel founded in 2009, a public channel, a film and television variety channel and a youth channel, and a separate Sansha satellite service for the South China Sea city of Sansha. The Travel Channel remained the group's established national brand, the tourism channel that outside audiences associated with the province.

Its identity rested on the combination it had built in the previous decade: a twenty-four-hour specialised schedule, a joint-venture operating company, and a home province whose economy was increasingly organised around visitors, from the resorts of Sanya and Yalong Bay — where China's first five-star hotel had been followed by a bay full of them — to the duty-free shopping that followed the international tourism island policy.

The end of the Travel Channel in 2019

The Travel Channel era closed in the spring of 2019. On 29 April 2019 Xinhua, reporting the Beijing Youth Daily's account under a headline that announced the end of Tourism Satellite TV, described the channel's May Day revamp and upgrade. From 2019 the service ceased to use the Travel Channel name and was renamed Hainan Satellite TV, reverting to a provincial identity under which it had, in effect, begun in 1999.

The change ended a seventeen-year run, from 2002 to 2019, in which a small island station had operated China's only dedicated travel channel. The historical listings of China's provincial satellite channels preserved the record in a parenthesis: Hainan Satellite TV, with the note that from 2002 to 2019 its name was the Travel Channel.

The successor channel after 2019

The renamed Hainan Satellite TV kept the outward-looking, tourism-and-trade flavour of its predecessor. Its best documented later programme was The World's Specialty, a major economic, trade and cultural exchange programme launched on 25 September 2021 and broadcast at 19:30 on Saturday nights. Ambassadors in China from countries including Uruguay, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, Guyana, Cuba, Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Egypt and Malta appeared on the programme to recommend their countries' speciality products and present their national cultures, with the featured goods sold online at the same time through a Taobao livestream room.

Hainan Television itself continued to develop after the rename. In June 2025 the Hainan International Media Center was created with the support of Hainan Television and the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, focusing on relations between China and the Arab world. The institution was a descendant, in spirit, of the experiment that had begun in 1999: an island station using a satellite channel to speak to audiences far beyond Hainan.