WHAT GETTING A CAR TOWED TAUGHT ME ABOUT EXPERIENCE DESIGN
ON WHY THE UNSEXY PARTS OF AN EXPERIENCE MATTER JUST AS MUCH AS THE ACTIVITY ITSELF.
A few months ago, I hosted an art night with a few friends to escape the heat of a Southern summer. A few days earlier, we’d all gone to the Gibbes Museum in Charleston to see a new Monet exhibition and admire Rodin’s bronze sculptures. Fresh off the heels of all that inspiration, we decided we were more than qualified to try our own hand at oils and acrylics.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the parts of the evening that felt important. The room. The lighting. The music. Brigitte Bardot or bossa nova? What should be on the kitchen table? Who should come? How might people meet one another? My mind went quickly to the atmosphere I wanted to create once everyone was inside: warm, loose, and open enough that people could actually relax into being together.
By most measures, it worked.
Friends arrived and, almost immediately, collectively decided that sitting around a table with our bulky canvases felt far too formal. So we picked up our supplies and sprawled across the living-room hardwoods instead. Over the next few hours — and a few glasses of Sauvignon blanc — we moved between stretches of concentrated silence, dramatic sighs, unsolicited artistic critique, and laughter at the obvious absurdity of our attempts to become master painters in a single evening.
The room developed a particular kind of energy that I love in a hosted gathering: loose enough to feel spontaneous, but considered enough that something meaningful might actually happen. A revelation. An admission. A moment of connection. Something remembered that leaves you feeling a little different from when you walked in the door.
As the night wound down, we carried our canvases out onto the porch to dry in the heat of the night. One of my friends went outside to take her paints back to her car and discovered that the car was no longer there. It had been towed from the corner-store parking lot where she’d left it — where I had told her it would be fine to park because, for as long as I could remember, nothing ever happened to cars in that lot.
Not exactly the closing ritual I had imagined.
After paying a $250 fine and driving halfway across town to retrieve it, we laughed the whole thing off and chalked it up to one of the less charming perks of living in a rapidly growing tourist town. But in retrospect, it was also an unusually clear lesson in experience design. I had spent hours preparing for the evening’s activity. I had not really designed the entirety of the experience.
I had designed an event. I had not designed everything someone had to move through in order to participate in it.
Those are not quite the same thing.
We tend to give most of our creative attention to the things we want people to remember. The dinner. The exhibition. The hotel room. The workshop. The performance. The product feature. We obsess over the center: the charcuterie spread, the speech, the lighting, the playlist, the moment of reveal, the final act. And understandably so. Those are the moments where discovery and delight are most visible.
Yet people encounter the arc of an experience long before they reach its center. It begins with arrival. Where do I park? Which door do I enter? Am I early? Am I late? Do I knock? Where does my coat go? On the bed? On the back of a chair?
Then comes orientation. What is happening here? What is expected of me? Who do I know in the room? Is it awkward? Where should I stand? Do I belong? What do I do with my hands?
Most of these questions are answered without anyone ever asking them out loud. People read the room. They look for signals and start to notice whether the experience seems to anticipate their presence or whether they have been left to figure things out themselves.
That matters because the edges of an experience are often where trust gets established.
If the moment of arrival is confusing, you carry a little of that confusion into the room. If you feel awkward at the threshold, the experience begins with self-consciousness instead of curiosity. If everything around the central activity feels thoughtful and legible, you feel freer to actually participate in it. And eventually, of course, you have to leave.
That part matters too.
Can I get home easily? Is there somewhere safe to wait for a ride? Is there a graceful way to say goodbye, or are we doing it Irish style? What happens to the energy of the evening once I cross the threshold? Do I leave feeling cared for, rushed, stranded, or nearly $300 poorer because my car is sitting in an impound lot?
None of these are especially glamorous design problems. That is probably why they are so easy to forget. They are also some of the moments where an experience becomes either coherent or fragmented.
The more experiences I’ve designed since then, the more interested I’ve become in these edges: arrival, orientation, transitions, departure, follow-up. The moments between the moments. They are rarely the reason someone comes, but they shape whether someone is able to fully encounter their reason for being there.
A great peak cannot always compensate for a frustrating journey into it. Read the reviews of almost any Airbnb or Tripadvisor experience in the middle of summer travel season: The view from the tower was incredible, but we couldn’t find our host. The kids loved how the guide brought history to life, but the entrance was so chaotic we nearly joined the wrong group.
Even an incredible experience loses some of its luster when the edges are frayed. A beautiful boutique hotel room in Paris feels a little less beautiful after a chaotic check-in. A concert you booked for your anniversary can become, months later, “the night we spent twenty minutes trying to figure out whether those were actually our seats.” A brilliant acting workshop becomes harder to enter when nobody has thought about how twelve strangers become a group.
The reverse can also be true.
A well-designed arrival can create anticipation. A thoughtful transition can help people understand what is happening next. A graceful departure can extend the emotional life of an experience after the “activity” is over.
Hospitality understands this intuitively. The first welcome at the door matters. So does knowing where to sit. So does the way the bill arrives, the way your coat is handed back to you, and the way someone at the front desk helps you navigate back home. Hospitality treats these small transitions not as administrative details around the experience, but as part of the experience itself.
After reviewing thousands of Experiences around the world at Airbnb and hosting quite a few things myself through the years, this distinction has stayed with me: An experience is not simply an activity you invite people to. It is everything a person has to move through in order to participate in a shared moment of connection.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m a devil for the details. I still care deeply about the room itself. Who’s showing up. The objects. The atmosphere. The playlist. The rhythm. The meaning — or sometimes the complete frivolity — of whatever is happening there.
I just think a little more about parking now.
