Introduction: In this opinion piece, Shiseido Travel Retail Asia Pacific Vice President, Commercial and Business Development Fran Law examines how traveller engagement with beauty is evolving and what that means for the future of the category in travel retail. As shopping behaviours become more fluid, Law argues that beauty is no longer experienced in isolation but in motion, shaped by mood, moment and discovery rather than fixed purchase lists.
She highlights Hainan’s role as both a commercial powerhouse and a testing ground for new retail concepts. Central to this is Shiseido’s Beauty Terminal, a portfolio-led environment designed to reflect how travellers naturally browse across brands, categories and touchpoints in travel retail.
Beauty has always held a special place in travel retail, sitting at the intersection of routine, indulgence and discovery. What is changing is not its relevance, but the way in which travellers engage with it as browsing patterns becomes less predictable.
Today, skincare, makeup, fragrance and suncare are increasingly explored together, influenced by mood, moment and impulse rather than a fixed shopping list. As a result, beauty portfolios are no longer experienced in isolation, but in motion.
This shift has prompted deeper reflection on how beauty portfolios are experienced in travel retail and whether existing retail formats reflect how travellers shop on the go.
Why Hainan matters
Hainan brings these dynamics into sharp focus. Despite broader industry headwinds, it concentrates on real consumer behaviour, real spending decisions and real-time pressure in one environment.
During a recent New Year holiday, the island welcomed more than 2.17 million tourists, representing a year-on-year growth of over 25%, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, highlighting the scale and pace of growth.
At the same time, offshore duty-free sales reached around CNY3.89 billion (US$557.4 million) in just three weeks, driven by 585,000 duty-free shoppers navigating the new customs regime (as reported by The Moodie Davitt Report).
International connectivity continues to add momentum. Sanya is now linked to 32 overseas destinations across 24 countries via more than 41 international routes, supported by visa-free access from 86 countries (source: China Daily).
Together, these conditions bring a wider mix of traveller profiles into a single market, creating a rare environment to observe how beauty consumption varies across cultures, categories and shopping motivations under real commercial conditions.
A live environment for learning
Few markets combine Hainan’s scale, immediacy and pace of feedback. In a single weekend, it becomes clear which concepts attract attention, where travellers slow down and what prompts them to move from interest to decision when browsing time is compressed.
Consumers make quick decisions once they gain confidence in a product and brand, making every moment count when it comes to conversion.
Within beauty, travellers browse with intent while remaining open to discovery. Familiar products often anchor the journey, while curiosity determines how far exploration extends. In this environment, even small moments of reassurance or reservations surface quickly, making Hainan a powerful place to learn in real time.
This is the reality the Beauty Terminal was designed for. Rather than prescribing a fixed journey, the experience allows shopper behaviour to surface naturally, offering clearer insight into how discovery, comparison and choice unfold across a single visit.
What a portfolio perspective reveals
Shiseido ParlourEstablished in 1902, Shiseido Parlour was Japan’s first soda fountain, selling soda water and ice cream – a rarity at the time. Today, it sits within the Tokyo Ginza Shiseido Building, offering a restaurant, cafe and a shop, continuing its legacy as a pioneer of Japanese Western cuisine with refined dishes and luxury sweets. |
Against this backdrop, travellers have the opportunity to experience Shiseido Travel Retail’s brands as a connected portfolio for the first time in travel retail.
Individually, each brand has a strong identity. Viewed together, the portfolio better reflects how travellers engage with beauty in motion.
Bringing together SHISEIDO, Clé de Peau Beauté, NARS, ANESSA, ELIXIR, THE GINZA and IPSA into a single walk-through environment allows patterns to emerge that are difficult to see when brands operate in isolation.
Cross-brand exploration reveals where familiarity builds reassurance, where affinities form across categories and where travellers are willing to experiment.
For the wider travel retail ecosystem, this shifts the focus from individual brand performance to how value is created across the experience as a whole.
Heritage as a source of differentiation
Alongside experimentation, trust remains central to decision-making. While the Beauty Terminal explores new ways of experiencing beauty, it is anchored in Shiseido Group’s Japanese heritage and expressed through how the experience feels.
That heritage shows up in the details. Craftsmanship and attentiveness shape how travellers are welcomed and supported as they move through the space, while elements such as the Shiseido Parlour bring the spirit of Omotenashi [the Japanese philosophy of hospitality centred on anticipatory care, attentiveness and sincerity] into a duty-free setting.
These moments of Japanese hospitality resonate strongly in Hainan, where trust and quality play a central role in shaping consumer confidence.
Looking ahead
Hainan matters more today because it brings clarity at a time where consumer behaviour is evolving faster than retail formats. It is a market where innovation is tested by real travellers, under real commercial pressure, revealing quickly what has the potential to scale globally and what needs to be refined.
The Beauty Terminal reflects one way of learning from this environment. More broadly, it points to a shift in how innovation in travel retail can be approached: by observing behaviour closely and designing with a deeper understanding of how travellers browse, decide and commit. In markets like Hainan, that clarity is what separates concepts that endure from those that simply attract attention. 🏝️
