Most company offsites have the same problem: the activity only works for half the room. The golf day loses the non-golfers, the hike loses the people who would rather be anywhere else, and the escape room loses everyone over thirty. A surf session in the ocean is worse still — it depends on swell, and it splits the team into the three who can surf and the seventeen who watch. A private wave pool session fixes all of that in one hour of water. At Riyue Bay in Wanning, Hainan, the PerfectSwell® pool takes up to twenty surfers at a time, runs more than twenty wave settings from first-timer rollers to barrels, and belongs entirely to your team for the hour. This is how to build a corporate surf offsite around it.
Why a wave pool is the best team-building venue you haven’t tried
Surfing is the rare activity where a complete beginner and a seasoned surfer can share a lineup and both have the best hour of their week — provided each of them gets the right wave. In the ocean that never happens; in a private pool session it is the default. Book the first hour on a gentle beginner setting with coaches in the water, and the people who have never stood on a board are riding whitewater to the beach within the hour. Book the next on a punchier setting and the surfers in the group get the walls and sections they came for. Same pool, same afternoon, nobody left on the sand. Our PerfectSwell explainer walks through what each setting does.
The second thing the pool does for a team is put every wave in front of an audience. The lineup sits a few metres from the deck, so the whole company watches every take-off, every wipeout and every first green wave — which is exactly the shared, slightly ridiculous, high-fiving experience an offsite is meant to manufacture. And unlike a boat trip or a swell-dependent surf lesson, a session booked for 14:00 runs at 14:00, with the wave you chose, whatever the ocean is doing. For anyone planning a company event a season out, that predictability is the whole reason to pick a pool.
How a private session works for a company group
A private buyout reserves the entire pool for your group, booked by the hour. Each hour takes up to twenty surfers, and you set the wave programme: one setting per hour, switched between hours, so a two-hour block can run beginner then intermediate, or intermediate then something with a barrel in it. Sessions are priced per pool, not per person — the published list rate is CNY 7,760 per hour on the Intermediate setting and CNY 9,960 per hour on Advanced and Pro — so a full pool of twenty is the cheapest surfing per head on the island, and a team of forty simply rotates two groups through back-to-back hours.
Around the water we add what a team needs. Professional coaches take the beginners from the sand to their first ride and are available for every level. A professional surf photographer can shoot each session and deliver edited images of every surfer — the offsite recap writes itself. Bring your own boards, or ask us to add the right rental boards for the crew from the rental quiver steps from the pool. And one number on WhatsApp runs the entire trip: session changes, restaurants, transport, whatever your crew needs. Our guide to private wave pool sessions describes what a private hour actually feels like; the buyout designer turns rooms, nights, sessions and extras into one price for your dates.
A three-night offsite, day by day
Teams usually give us three nights: two working days wrapped around the surf, with the pool as the reward at the end of each. The frame below is the one that works; the surf calendar shows the published session grid if you would rather join scheduled hours than book the pool outright.
Sample corporate surf offsite · 3 nights at Riyue Bay
Where the team stays, eats and works
The logistics of an offsite are usually the part that kills it: buses, transfers between the hotel and the activity, half the group late. At Riyue Bay there is nothing to transfer to. UECHAO Hotel Riyuebay sits inside the surf-park grounds: rooms, breakfast hall, lounge, surf club and the pool itself are about a minute apart on foot, and the South China Sea is on the other side of the same property. Six room types cover a company group — standard Ocean & Pool View and Garden View rooms with king or twin beds for colleagues sharing, Designer rooms and suites for the leadership tier, and the 72 m² Owner’s Suite for whoever signed the budget. A tropical breakfast buffet is included every morning and served until 1:30 PM, which matters after a late night on the rooftop lounge.
Working sessions fit around the surf rather than the other way round. Tell us what your agenda needs — a morning of workshops, a dinner for the whole company, an awards night — and we arrange it before you land, the same way your sessions are confirmed before you land. Our guide to the surf hotel goes room by room.
Getting a team there from Hong Kong, Singapore or Australia
For companies based in Asia’s hub cities this is a shorter trip than most domestic offsites. Hong Kong to Haikou (HAK) is about an hour direct; Singapore flies to Haikou daily; Sydney and Melbourne have direct flights to Haikou too, and Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul all connect. Sanya (SYX) is the alternative airport, about an hour’s drive from the bay against two from Haikou. Hainan runs its own 30-day visa-free entry for passport holders from the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada and many other countries, so a mixed-nationality team mostly needs no paperwork at all — we confirm every guest’s eligibility when you book, and the visa-free guide has the detail. Private airport transfers are included; for a group we run several vans in convoy, each with room for board bags, and we track the flights so a delayed departure just moves the pickup. Every route is in our getting here guide.
Beyond the pool: golf, ocean surf and the island
The classic offsite split — golf for some, something else for the rest — works better here than almost anywhere, because both halves are world class and thirty minutes apart. The Dunes at Shenzhou Peninsula, the Tom Weiskopf and Phil Smith links along a South China Sea headland, is widely rated the best links course in China. Up near Haikou airport, Blackstone at Mission Hills is a former world top-100 layout cut through black lava fields, the course where Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy went head to head. Book tee times for the golfers through the golf inquiry, and the non-golfers get a second hour in the pool.
When the swell runs in the cooler months, Riyue Bay’s ocean break is a short walk from the pool deck, and the surfers who found their feet on Day 2 can try the real thing on Day 3. Off the water, Wanning is a slower China than the one your team knows from business trips: seafood straight off the boats, coconut hotpot and Xinglong coffee from plantations a short drive inland, and more than two thousand years of Li culture in the villages behind the coast. A group dinner with a traditional Li performance is the evening most teams remember.
What it costs and how to book
Think of the budget in three lines. The pool: list rates of CNY 7,760 or 9,960 per private hour for up to twenty surfers, with special offers on selected dates and group sizes — ask us for your rate. The resort: rooms per night, breakfast included, on the rates page. The extras: coaching, the photographer, rental boards, golf and any dinners you want arranged. Round-trip private airport transfers and our team for the whole stay are already inside the price. One date to plan around: the pool is closed for a scheduled upgrade until 23 September 2026 and reopens on 24 September, so autumn and winter — the dry, cooler season with the best ocean surf — are the offsite window.
To start, send your headcount, rough dates, home city and a line on the surfing ability in the room to hello@surfchina.co (WhatsApp +8613893402173), or run the numbers yourself in the buyout designer. You will get back a session plan, a room plan and a price for the whole crew in one email. Browse the trip packages for the per-person alternative, or keep reading the journal for the rest of the trip.
