Experience Divide

5 MIN READ

Visitor Experience is not branding. It’s not ops. It’s not architecture. So what is it?

Nowhere are the aspirations for the future of Visitor Experience more ambitious than in the Middle East, where bold ideas are shaping vast, living environments imagined at extraordinary scale. Following global milestones like Expo 2020 Dubai in the UAE and the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the region is now entering an even more transformative wave of once-in-a-generation cultural, urban, and sporting projects. But is Visitor Experience design, management, and delivery keeping pace with these ambitions?

There is a growing divide between the desire to create meaningful, transformative experiences and the reality of their uniform, transactional delivery. The gap is not one of intent, but of tools. Visitor Experience remains a discipline defined by mistaken identity and unclear ownership. As a result, the industry lacks the intellectual and creative rigour, the planning language, and the governance structures needed to embed experience into projects from the outset. Without these foundations, a bold vision collapses into templates, and creativity dissolves into sameness.

Mistaken Identity

Visitor Experience design is often mistaken as an extension of branding — a system of visuals, slogans, and funnels for selling something. Branding is mostly centred around customers and control. Visitor Experience focuses on the mindset that people bring to a place; branding focuses on the message and how the brand wants to be understood in a controlled environment. Experience is about allowing people to move through space, inhabit it, and make meaning within it.

Sometimes Visitor Experience is confused with operations — a matter of ensuring efficiency, flow, and seamless movement. But flow is not memory, and efficiency is not emotion. Seamlessness may serve the organisation’s logistics, but it rarely serves the visitor’s wonder.

And often Visitor Experience is equated with architecture — grand structures that impress the eye but leave little emotional trace after the first visual impact and “wow” reaction. A building that photographs well is not necessarily one that speaks in an interesting way.

In this confusion, Visitor Experience design is the orphan, passed between well-meaning but ill-suited foster parents. Branding offers scripted identity, operations deliver logistical precision, architecture contributes form and sensory impact. These disciplines are essential to great experiences, which is precisely why it is easy to assume that Visitor Experience falls within their remit. But this assumption is where the divide begins. Each field necessarily brings its own tools and methodologies to the tasks, yet none are equipped to define, develop, or deliver the full depth of human experience. Without dedicated methods and leadership, Visitor Experience design remains underdeveloped, under-funded, and adrift. The result is a landscape of polished but placeless destinations: potentially beautiful, but emotionally hollow.

The Growing Divide

Just as the roots of the Experience Divide become apparent, a new challenge is emerging. Large, vertically integrated firms now offer “one-stop” solutions, blending branding, operations, digital, and management consulting. But this consolidation does not solve the problem; it institutionalises it, because it combines the very tools and mindsets that created the divide in the first place. Experience remains sidelined, and the nuance, specificity, and cultural intelligence that make places meaningful are flattened into templates and efficiency-driven outputs. The result is uniformity dressed as coherence. We do not need more consolidation. We need the development of tools, methods, and teams specific to the craft of Visitor Experience.

Closing the Divide

The solution begins with recognising what visitor experience truly is: a strategic discipline rooted in human engagement, cultural insight, and spatial affordances. Its goal is not to deliver engagement as a product or to choreograph control, but to create conditions that enable connection, curiosity, and feeling on people’s own terms. This is why customer journeys, when used as the foundation of experience planning, are so fundamentally flawed and only further expand the divide by reducing people to predictable sequences, disconnected from place, emotion, and spontaneity. Real human experience is non-linear and situational, shaped as much by what a space offers as by what a person brings to it. Instead of scripts and prescriptive journeys, we should design around affordances: the inherent possibilities a space offers for movement, interaction, memory, and reflection. Designing for experience means designing for freedom, not control.

To close the divide, we must treat Visitor Experience as a discipline in its own right; one that integrates creativity, collaboration, and coherence.

Creativity in this discipline is about depth and connection. It needs to bring substance, not just spectacle. It is not an aesthetic flourish or the final decorative afterthought. It should transform places through atmosphere, narrative, and emotion, layering meaning into form and allowing spaces to speak across time, culture, and memory. True creativity is not measured in moments of "wow," but in resonance, diversity, and the richness of what visitors carry with them long after. This requires rigour, care and a depth of research. This type of creativity is not a luxury, it is foundational.

“You wouldn’t plan a city with no roads. Why plan a visitor experience with no map?”

Collaboration requires structure, and above all, a shared language. To plan experiences we need the ability to name, categorise, map, and connect experiences with the same precision we apply to infrastructure. Without this, experience becomes invisible. Trying to design experiences without proper tools is like asking an electrician to install lighting without electrical drawings—you might get lights, but in the wrong places and likely clashing with the planned location of other infrastructure. Yet this is what happens in project after project: vague user journeys overlaid on CAD files are passed off as experience planning. It is not. True collaboration is only possible when Visitor Experience is developed with a dedicated visual and strategic plan—mapped alongside architecture and delivery schedules—so it can be understood, iterated, and owned by all teams. Without this, experience cannot be designed, budgeted and managed. Only improvised.

Coherence is about ownership. Visitor Experience must have a seat at the table early, consistently, and with authority. It cannot be delegated to branding, bolted onto operations, or retrofitted after construction. It must have its own leadership, its own roadmap, its own masterplan, and its own milestones embedded into the lifecycle of the project, from concept to delivery. When Visitor Experience is siloed, or positioned as secondary, the result is disjointed delivery, wasted effort and lost potential. Coherence means alignment and not uniformity: it ensures that the creative vision, cultural depth, and strategic intent of a place are carried through from concept to construction and on to live activation. It is what prevents the experience from being diluted or misrepresented in delivery. This requires authority, responsibility and accountability.

We also need to draw on expertise that truly makes experiences distinct: ethnographers who understand culture and behaviour, linguists who shape naming beyond translation, historians and curators who translate place into memory. For example, a small naming team might uncover metaphors in local dialect that anchor a project in the public imagination, but only if the naming process itself is taken seriously. Too often, placeholder names from masterplans are carried forward without reflection, leaving destinations without voice or soul. This is not a cosmetic step but a critical cultural building block.

The future lies not in pipelines, but in ecosystems. Visitor Experience must be shaped by expert collaborators working alongside architecture, branding, and operations, and enabled by new tools, insights, and questions. Artificial intelligence will play an important and exciting role, but only if guided by the right thinking and skillset. Without that, it will merely automate the existing flaws, producing sameness at speed, and optimised boredom at scale.

The divide between aspiration and delivery is widening. To bridge it, Visitor Experience must no longer be treated as an accessory. It must be recognised as a core discipline: the discipline that constructs meaning, memory, and civic value. It needs its own seat, its own mandate, and the right team to bring it to life. Creativity, collaboration, and coherence are management necessities grounded in creative rigour, a new shared language, and empowered by strong governance. They are the necessary infrastructure for designing better experiences, and building better places.

Written by Federica Busa, Robin McGowan & Mark Woodward

Illustrated by Mark Woodward

View their profiles here

Visitor Experience is the art of creating extraordinary moments with lasting resonance. Busa Woodward is a Visitor Experience advisory that brings the creative force of design, the depth of culture, the science of human behaviour, and the rigour of planning to some of the world’s most ambitious projects. Through deep narrative, innovative design practice, and proprietary tools like Experience Masterplanning, Behavioural Audits, and Spatial Affordance Mapping, we shape spaces that invite people to move, feel, and connect and bring project aspirations to life in ways that are measurable, meaningful and measurable.