Travel TV Host Samantha Brown Has A New Show, But Her Departure From The Travel Channel Starts The Conversation About The Dearth Of Women Travel Experts On Major Cable And TV Networks
by Heather Cassell
If you’ve ever flipped through your TV guide on the Travel Channel, the Food Network, or CNN’s travel show selections, one thing is very obvious, the shows are all hosted by white men.
In 2016, the Travel Channel had a host of interesting shows, such as “Breaking Borders,” “36-Hours,” “Rev Runs Around the World,” and the channel was in talks with Queen Latifah about a travel show, but she only appeared in “The Best Place To Be” edition “Rio: Fit for a Queen.” The shows were diverse with women co-hosts and hosts who were celebrities from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds.
It was exciting, but that excitement was short lived. The shows disappeared never to return. Queen Latifah never got her own travel show and this year, the channel’s longest-running female host, Samantha Brown, 47, said farewell to the Travel Channel and hello to PBS with her new show “Places to Love.”
The Travel Channel reverted to extra all-white testosterone on the road with “Bizarre Foods,” “Booze Traveler,” “Delicious Destinations,” “Expedition Unknown,” “Extreme Hotels,” “Ghost Adventures,” “Man v. Food,” and “Mysteries at the Museum” that certainly toons me as well as other women travelers out.
Samantha was it and she suffered the same media warp or whatever it is that happens to female travel hosts on big cable, major networks, and even streaming hasn’t been the wave of the future for women travel shows. So, when Samantha departed from the channel she left a gaping hole in the world of travel shows’ when it comes to the perspective and voice of gender and diversity.
The channel did add travel writer and pilot Kellee Edwards’ “Mysterious Islands” show last year, however, the show has the same problem as other women headed travel shows experience: the mysterious announce and disappearing act.
Journey’s Past And Present
Samantha survived through more than 15 years where viewers saw successful female-led travel shows fade into the TV channel executives’ boardrooms.
The Food Network had Rachael Ray’s “$40 a Day” and “Rachael’s Vacation;” Giada De Laurentiis’ “Giada’s Weekend Getaways” and “Giada in Paradise;” and award-winning chef Kamini Pather’s “Girl Eat World,” noted Conde Nast Traveler, but those shows are gone.
So are Gwyneth Paltrow’s one season wonder “Spain… on the Road Again” on PBS and Bridget Marquardt’s “Bridget’s Sexiest Beaches” on the Travel Channel.
Fortunately, Bravo, PBS, and Viceland are getting that women travel and that we need to see ourselves reflected as hosts of travel shows on the silver screen.
Viceland has brought women travel viewers Meg Gill’s “Beerland,” Ellen Page’s “Gaycations,” and Hailey Gates’ “States of Undress” within the past two years.
Last summer, the Food Network launched, “I Hart Food,” where YouTuber Hanna Hart travels across the United States discovering the best food in every region she rolls into.
Hanna’s show, “My Drunk Kitchen,” aired on YouTube for seven years.
Bravo, just launched love expert and TV host and personality Diann Valentine’s traveling matchmaking show, Bravo’s “To Rome for Love,” adding some color to TV’s female travel offerings.
PBS just added Samantha. The public station had Darley Newman of “Equitrekking” already in it’s ranking. Globe Trekker’s co-hosts Megan McCormick, Brianna Barnes, Holly Morris, and Judith Jones among others have been showing women how they are clearing paths for women travelers around the world.
In San Francisco, Lizzie Bermudez hosts ABC7’s “Bay Area Life,” covering local weekend escapes and happenings around the bay area.
Still, it’s hard, to find and get to watch women travel hosts on TV. First, there’s a lack of getting the word out about these intrepid women and second, accessing the shows has proven to be a bit of a tease.
It should be easy in the San Francisco Bay Area to look up Samantha’s new show on KQED, the local PBS station, on Comcast or any one of Viceland’s shows, but they appear in the listings as “repeats” and without the option to view or record on the DVR for later viewing. I only got to watch half of Samantha’s new shows on her website.
What are women wanderlusters to do? It doesn’t make sense that there is, one: this dearth of female travel show’s hosts, and, two: does it really have to be this hard to watch fellow female travelers on TV?
The answer seems to be yes. I don’t know why it is difficult to be able to watch shows about women travelers on TV, but it is.
Samantha is just as puzzled by the imbalance between cold hard figures that show women travel more than men and hold the purse when it comes to making travel decisions for themselves and their family.
After all, women make 80 percent of all travel decisions and women make up one-third of travelers that travel at least five times a year. More than half (54 percent) of the most affluent travelers are women, according to the George Washington University School of Business. Seriously, the women’s travel market potentially exceeds $19 trillion annually with its army of galivanting women reaching more than 67 million travelers, according to Marybeth Bond of The Gutsy Traveler.
“The visual of a woman confidently traveling is a powerful one,” said Samantha, noting there are safety concerns that women have while traveling that men don’t have to contend with.
“People have seen me travel, they see me in the world. All of a sudden it makes it possible,” she said.
“I’ve survived skiing in Afghanistan, a bus tour of Iraq, and an expedition of the Arctic,” said “A Broad Abroad” web show host Paula Froelich. “I can deal with this.”
Yet, women travelers aren’t the faces beaming out from the screen on TV’s travel shows on all of these networks National Geographic, History Channel, Travel Channel, Food Network, Discovery, CNN, truTV, SundanceTV, Spike, Animal Planet, A&E, Science, Syfy, IFC, BBC America, and MTV.
It hasn’t changed either with new platforms, such as streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.
Travel Channel’s SVP of programming Courtney White disagreed with the women travel hosts accusations that the “network shies away from female voices,” reported Travel and Leisure, despite the obvious evidence that the channel’s shows are stacked with white male hosts.
“Charismatic stars, male or female, who capture the audience’s imaginations and deliver on epic adventures, mind-blowing explorations, amazing foods, and bring a fun, unique, high-energy perspective to the table will resonate with our audience,” White says. “None of those things is gender specific.”
Defending the network, she noted that the channel was bringing on new programming with women hosts, including the aforementioned “Mysterious Islands” with Kellee Edwards who was being joined by fellow flygirl bush pilot Ariel Tweto’s show “True Alaska” (formerly titled, “Alaska 1,000 Ways” and Claire Burns’ “Retro Eats” (formerly titled “Vintage American”), and husband and wife adventurers Ashlan and Philippe Cousteau’s “Caribbean Pirate Treasure.” Yes, Philippe is following his grandfather, famed explorer and conservationist Jacques Cousteau’s, Caribbean trails.
“Caribbean Pirate Treasure” aired its first episode in late August last year.
It appears, like the female hosted travel shows before them, the women’s shows have also never appeared, or they disappeared with nearly no trace they even existed before they even aired.
“It just doesn’t add up,” she said. “There is a whole consumer base with a massive budget that [they’re] not reaching because [they] do not have a woman” representing female travelers on TV, Brown told Conde Nast Traveler.
Travel, in executive’s minds, is and has been the domain of men since the stone ages and today, the man holds the remote control to view his global adventures.
“Television is very tough and I think the television world just feels like travel is the man’s space, that travel and adventure are for men,” said Samantha, who noted what Travel Channel producers told her a decade ago. “Listen, we don’t want women anymore.”
Their reasoning is because men control the remote in the relationship.
“That was their thing; that’s what was passed down to me,” she said. “So, they put men at the helm of those shows.”
“Anthony Bourdain was everything. Everyone wanted the next Bourdain, and they wanted me to be the next, kind of, off the cuff, too cool for school [host],” she said. “I love Anthony Bourdain, but we’re very different. And the reason why Anthony Bourdain is amazing is because he is who he is. He’s very authentic. And so everyone asked me, can you be more like him? I just said I can’t, so I’m not going to do this show.”
Darley had a similar experience two years ago and the sexism was quite blatant.
“I went to a talent agent—a woman—and she’s like, ‘If you’re not in a bikini on a beach, no one wants to watch you,’” Darley told Travel and Leisure. “It was the most depressing thing.”
Paula was also frustrated with TV power brokers, she told the magazine.
Her show attracted between 750,000 and 1 million viewers on average weekly with a 70 percent watch-through rate when it was on the former Yahoo! Travel platform. Slam dunk, right? Any TV network would want her with an audience like that.
“Literally, it’s impossible,” Paula said.
“On television, there are no female travel hosts. Despite the fact that women are the ones traveling, women are the ones with money, and women are clearly the ones who want to watch,” she said after shopping “A Broad Abroad” around to several major and minor networks and other platforms.
Paula hopes one day, gender is off the table entirely, she told Travel and Leisure.
It Was Time
That’s why Samantha took matters into her own hands writing, editing, fundraising, and hosting “Places to Love,” which aired its first episode earlier this month on PBS.
Samantha, who is generally very bubbly and optimistic, is grateful for fellow travel show host Anthony, who planted a seed with some advice during a conversation at a party many years ago after she commented about all of the great things that he got to do, but the channel wouldn’t let her do.
He simply told her, “You don’t ever have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“He’s right. You don’t ever have to do anything you don’t want to do. That’s always stayed with me because he had such confidence, and it took me another 10 years to get there,” said Samantha.
She’s also grateful for her husband, the many people who saw a need for a female voice in travel media who backed her new venture, and her crew, she told Conde Nast Traveler.
She is even grateful for the Travel Channel pushing her to change until she reached a final point where she simply didn’t want to be molded into someone she isn’t.
She also noted to Travel and Leisure that at least today there are more potential opportunities for women online, where the audience decides who to watch, and women travel show hosts and travelers have been making good use of YouTube, Vimeo, Brightcove and others.
Hanna is one example of how she catapulted herself into the cable network land through YouTub. Darley did something similar with, “Travels With Darley,” which started airing on AOL in 2014, reported Travel and Leisure. It helped her land her show on PBS.
Paula continues to produce “A Broad Abroad” online in hopes that with numbers like hers a network will eventually pick it up.
Places To Love
Samantha, who started in travel entertainment in 1999 when “Great Vacation Homes” premiered, has two goals with her new show, “Places to Love.”
First, to create a show that is “more intimate, more personal look at the emotional value of travel,” she told Travel and Leisure.
Second, is to highlight the locals who are making their city or country visit-worthy.
When it’s a woman or women, even better.
“I’m always looking for the female angle, which I always feel gets lost in the world of men,” Samantha said.
Samantha want’s travelers to “really understanding their effort that goes into creating the experiences that we as travelers get to be a part of, whether it’s the effort to create a meal that you eat at a restaurant, a piece of music you hear at a concert, a piece of art,” she told Travel and Leisure.
Her adventures started with Houston, Texas; then she journeyed on to Huntsville, Alabama; Gowanus, Brooklyn; Xi’an, China; and Donegal, Ireland, among other cities and countries.
“We wanted to really show these up-and-coming places that don’t get any credit for being travel-worthy,” like Houston, which was under water last fall when Hurricane Harvey flooded the city.
Samantha filmed “Places to Love” three weeks before the hurricane hit the Texas city. She checked in with locals to make sure they were ready to welcome visitors. Houstonites were already getting back to business reassured her that they were ready for visitors.
She made the first show of “Places to Love” the Houston episode and she honored the city with a note during the opening.
“We’re really proud of that episode. The stories there are unbelievable,” Samantha told Travel and Leisure.
The premiere show is an example of the show’s message: a new perspective of yourself and the world.
“We’re all on this journey to understand ourselves, and to be better than we thought, and nothing gives us that opportunity like travel,” said Samantha. “You’re not in your controlled space, you’re not in the known world where you think you can predict what happens next, you know you’re out in the open and it allows you to think very differently, it allows us to be a different person, and that acceptance of meeting other people, and allowing them to affect you … I feel like is what this world needs a heck of a lot more of.”
Perhaps the best moments in Samantha’s new show is when she goes to Community Cloth, a nonprofit organization that helps women refugees resettle in Houston by bringing their crafts to market in the United States, in a feel great shopping moment. An adrenalin rush moment when a pink-clad skydiver divebombs her picnic with English expat cyclist Fay Manning and when she unexpectedly meets up with a women’s travel club on a train while she’s traveling through Switzerland. And tasting Pakistani food by Chef Fatima Ali, founder of Van Pakistan, at Smorgasburg, the largest weekly open-air food market in America, located in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
The show is already shaping up to be a fun adventure.
Book your adventure with Girls That Roam Travel. Contact Heather Cassell at Girls That Roam Travel at 415-517-7239 or at .
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