Role
End-to-end Service Designer · Researcher
The brief was about immersive experiences. What emerged from the field was something harder to design: the people, the dynamics, and the unwritten rules that no process manual could capture.
I spent weeks eating with hotel staff every day. Not interviewing them — eating with them.
I joined their breaks, learned their routines, and listened to what they talked about when nobody from corporate was in the room. That was the method.You can't design for people you don't understand, and you can't understand people you haven't sat with.
Before defining any solution, I interviewed 100 travellers from 45 countries — not hotel guests, not executives. People who travel, who seek experiences, who know the difference between a service that performs and one that genuinely connects.
The answers were as diverse as the cities I was working in. That diversity wasn't a problem to solve. It was the insight that shaped everything.
There was no connection between the corporate team and the people working in the hotels. Decisions were made far from the context where service actually happened.
Each location operated under its own unwritten rules — shaped by local culture, politics, and community dynamics that no standard process could anticipate.
The people delivering the service had no framework to make decisions that stayed true to the brand while adapting to their own context.
Standard consulting would have produced a standardised process. I did the opposite. Each team faced different pressures, different communities, different definitions of what good service means.
The solution wasn't to standardise the service — it was to develop the judgement of the people delivering it, so they could adapt without losing the brand's essence.
Each element creates sub-experiences that feed back into the whole. The map became the shared language between teams who had never had a common framework before — a way to point at the same thing and mean the same thing.
Designed so that the management team could evaluate every experience — proposed, in-flight, or already running — against the brand's essence, without losing it in the process. The tools didn't tell teams what to do. They asked them the right question, in the right order.
The canvas was the co-creation tool. It gave teams a structured way to design new experiences — not by following a template, but by reasoning through what each experience needed to achieve, for whom, and why. It was the working surface where head-office strategy and on-the-floor judgement met as equals.
My role ended with the delivery of the manual. What I witnessed before leaving was a team that felt heard — possibly for the first time in a corporate process.
Staff who had been skeptical of the project started using the language we had built together.
Programmed activities, local tours and on-property workshops — measured against the same property's prior season.
Independent makers, guides, kitchens — folded into the guest journey via the canvas, not via procurement.
“What happens next is theirs to build. That was always the point.”