Case · Falcons Creative Group · Travel & Hospitality
Putting the visitor at the heart of a hybrid theme park masterplan.
Connect spatial and program planning to real visitor experience, before a single element is built.
100+
experience offerings tested and revised with visitor personas
30+
visitor personas developed across guest segments
2
planning layers added: visitor journeys and the emotional arc
Introduction
Falcons Creative Group (FCG) develops hybrid destinations, such as theme parks, multi-use real-estate, integrated with hotels, restaurants, and standalone experience offerings, places designed to be visited by various profiles, for a day, a weekend, or a stay.
Masterplans of this scale are typically driven by spatial and program logic: what goes where, how much of it, and how it fits together. What they often lack is the visitor's perspective ; how a real guest will actually move through, feel about, and choose between everything the destination offers.
TCXA was engaged to close that gap: to add the visitor to the plan, and to pressure-test the experience offerings against real guest expectations before decisions became concrete.
The challenge
Hybrid destinations multiply complexity. A theme park, hotels, residences, restaurants, and experiences each follow their own planning logic, but visitors experience them as one continuous, often non-linear journey. FCG needed to address:
A missing visitor layer: Spatial and program plans described what the destination contained, but not how different visitors would experience it : routes, transitions, decision moments, and friction points across park, hotel, and dining.
An invisible emotional arc: A destination competes on how it makes people feel. Without an emotional layer, the plan couldn't show where anticipation builds, where energy dips, where moments of delight are needed, or where adjacent offerings might clash in tone.
Untested offerings: The experience portfolio was designed from the inside out. Whether real visitor segments would understand, value, and choose these offerings had not yet been validated, and revising after construction is orders of magnitude more expensive than revising on paper.
The solution
We connected the language of masterplanning with the language of experience.
Visitor Journey Layer : We translated the spatial and program plan into visitor journeys, mapping how distinct guest types move through the hybrid destination across a day and a stay, from pre-arrival, arrival through park, dining, hotel, and departure. This layer made visible what the floor plan couldn't: sequencing, transitions between offerings, orientation needs, and the friction points where the built environment and the visitor's intent diverge.
Emotional Experience Layer : On top of the journeys, we mapped the intended emotional arc of the destination, where excitement should peak, where guests need rest and recovery, where signature moments belong, and how the tone of adjacent offerings should relate. This gave planners and designers a shared reference for decisions that are usually left implicit: pacing, atmosphere, and contrast across the site.
Persona Testing & Offering Revision : We built visitor persona samples representing the destination's core guest segments and tested the experience offerings against them, assessing appeal, comprehension, fit within a visit, and willingness to engage. The findings fed directly back into the plan: offerings were revised, repositioned, or rebalanced based on how real visitor profiles responded, not internal assumptions.
The results
A masterplan that includes the visitor makes better decisions earlier, when change is still cheap. By adding the visitor and emotional layers and testing the portfolio before build, TCXA helped FCG:
Plan from the guest's perspective: Spatial and program decisions could now be evaluated against how visitors actually move, choose, and feel.
Design the emotional arc deliberately: Pacing, signature moments, and recovery zones became explicit planning inputs rather than afterthoughts.
De-risk the experience portfolio: Persona testing surfaced which offerings resonated and which needed rework, allowing revisions on paper instead of in concrete.
Align planners around one visitor story: The visitor and emotional layers gave spatial planners, program owners, and experience designers a common reference, reducing translation loss between disciplines.
“TCXA is a holistic, collaboration-driven partner that helps us bridge the gap between experience development planning and visitor journey design. Their strength lies in balancing CX expertise with future-forward creativity.”
FAQ
Falcons Creative Group: common questions.
The essentials of this engagement, answered.
Bridging the gap between spatial and program planning and actual visitor experience for a hybrid theme park destination with hotels, restaurants, and experience offerings.
Adding a visitor journey layer and an emotional layer to the masterplan, then testing the experience offerings with visitor persona samples and revising them based on the findings.
The masterplan gained an explicit visitor perspective, the experience portfolio was validated and revised pre-build, and planning disciplines aligned around a shared visitor story.