Designing the “Hello”: What Travel Taught Me About Service Design

If you follow me on Instagram, you are probably tired of seeing how many countries we have travelled through in the last month on what we jokingly call our Asia World Tour.

Travel has always been my biggest classroom. It gives you a front-row seat to how systems, cultures, and experiences work in motion.

The Kaleidoscope team asked me to share a few reflections from the road, so what follows is a mix of stories, observations, and lessons that I think every organisation can learn from.

Observing Systems in Motion

When I travel, the service designer in me cannot help noticing how things flow. Airports, immigration, public transport, hospitality. You do not even need to be in service design to feel when something is off, but for me it is almost impossible not to feel it.

An airport is the first “hello” a country gives you. It shapes how you expect the rest of the experience to feel. Some countries get that hello perfectly right. In Dubai or Singapore, for example, you glide through e-gates that recognise you instantly. You do not wait. You do not wonder what to do next. It just works.

Then there are other countries where one broken system sets everything back to paper forms and queues. You can feel the stress ripple through travellers and teams alike. It is not about technology failing; it is about what happens when it does.

That lesson carries directly into business. Reliability is not about everything being perfect, it is about how prepared you are when it is not. The best customer experiences are not the ones that never break, but the ones that recover quickly and gracefully, with empathy.

Designing for Reliability

One of the smoothest travel experiences I have ever had was entering Dubai and Singapore through their biometric e-gates. The process was so quick that I genuinely thought I had done something wrong. It made me realise how effortless service can feel when it is truly well designed.

That kind of reliability never happens by accident. It comes from clear wayfinding, solid processes, and systems that support people at every step. And when things do fail, the recovery should feel like it was always part of the plan.

At Kaleidoscope, when we work on RAPID decision-rights structures, one of the key conversations is about what happens when things do not go right think of these as your “failure-mode” moments.

The same thinking applies to service design. Every organisation should be asking:

• What could go wrong?

• How will the customer feel in that moment?

• What happens in the first five minutes?

• What communication follows in the first fifteen?

• How do we restore value within the first hour?

You cannot design resilience without imagining what the worst day might look like. Those conversations often reveal the real structure of an organisation more clearly than any org chart ever could.

Culture as a Design System

Every country designs for what it values most. That is something I noticed almost immediately when moving between Japan and Vietnam.

Japan values order. The streets are spotless, the trains are silent, and even though there are almost no bins, there is no litter. People take their waste home. Cleanliness is not enforced, it is internalised.

Vietnam, on the other hand, values motion. The traffic never stops, but it flows. Thousands of scooters move in rhythm, weaving around each other with surprising grace. It looks chaotic, but it works because everyone pays attention and respects the flow.

Neither culture is perfect, but both are intentional. Japan optimises for harmony, Vietnam for energy and growth. Both systems reveal what each society values most.

The same is true for organisations. Culture is not a side note or a department; it is a design system. It determines how decisions are made, how people interact, and how consistency or creativity shows up.

Familiar Brands and Local Adaptation

One of my favourite examples of thoughtful global design is Starbucks. No matter where you go in the world, you recognise the layout, the Wi-Fi, and the smell of coffee. Yet each store adapts to its setting.

In Kyoto, some Starbucks outlets are designed in restored townhouses where you sit on the floor on tatami mats, completely immersed in local architecture. Others are designed for speed, efficiency, and high foot traffic. In Japan you will find Mont Blanc cakes on the counter, while in Malaysia everything is halaal.

My nephew recently arrived in Kuala Lumpur and could not get his eSIM to work. His first instinct was to find the nearest Starbucks, connect to the Wi-Fi, and message us. That moment had nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with familiarity and trust.

That is what the best global brands get right. They hold their core and flex the rest. They do not simply replicate themselves in each market; they translate themselves.

What Organisations Can Learn

South Africa already has a strong culture of resilience and collaboration, but there is always space to learn from what other places do well.

Define your non-negotiables.

Decide what must stay consistent across every branch or region. Those are the anchors that make people trust you.

Localise with intent.

Adapt the details that make people feel seen, from language to timing to rituals. Relevance matters more than uniformity.

Design for flow, not hierarchy.

The best teams move like Vietnam’s traffic: aware, respectful, and fast. When everyone understands their lane and purpose, the system flows.

Build for reliability.

Your backup plan should be part of the experience, not an afterthought. Reliability is what people remember long after a glitch.

Grow from the ground up.

One thing I have loved about our clients this year is how many are building space for smaller partners to thrive. Encouraging small businesses, suppliers, and start-ups to operate within your ecosystem is where real growth begins. Every thriving economy I visited had that entrepreneurial heartbeat running through it.

The Takeaway

Travel sharpens your design instincts. It teaches you that good systems are human at their core and that culture is the invisible operating system behind every great experience.

You cannot copy Japan or Vietnam or any other model outright. You can only choose what matters most in your context and do it well.

For me, that is what service design is really about: holding the core, flexing the rest, and staying curious enough to keep learning from the world.