Designing the Complete Giant Panda Experience
An End-to-End Visitor Experience for the Calgary Zoo
The arrival of giant pandas presented the Calgary Zoo with an extraordinary opportunity to welcome new visitors, strengthen the overall zoo experience, and inspire meaningful conservation action. Delivering on that opportunity required more than designing an exhibit. Every part of the visit from buying tickets and entering the zoo to navigating the grounds, managing queues, meeting the pandas, and continuing the conservation story after leaving, needed to work as one connected experience.
Through experience mapping, design thinking, and rapid prototyping, we helped teams align their ideas, understand cross-functional dependencies, and prioritize the changes that would have the greatest impact on visitors and the Zoo’s conservation mission.
INDUSTRY
Tourism and Hospitality
CLIENT
Calgary Zoo
WHY IT MATTERS
A major new attraction affects much more than the space around it. It changes how visitors plan their day, move through the grounds, interact with employees, use amenities, and experience every other part of the organization.
By approaching Panda Passage as an end-to-end service experience, the Calgary Zoo could prepare for increased demand while creating a visit that felt welcoming, coherent, and meaningful. The work connected visitor satisfaction with the Zoo’s deeper purpose: helping people form an emotional connection with wildlife and understand how their everyday choices can support forests, biodiversity, and conservation.
PROCESS HIGHLIGHTS
We facilitated two full-day innovation workshops that brought employees from across the Zoo together to map the visitor journey, identify constraints, build physical prototypes, and prioritize ideas.
We helped connect planning across ticketing, arrival, wayfinding, queue management, exhibit interpretation, digital technology, amenities, staffing, retail, group visits, opening events, and post-visit conservation engagement.
Impact
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Visitor Level
Visitors were considered across the complete journey, beginning with trip planning and ticket purchase and continuing through arrival, navigation, the exhibit experience, amenities, departure, and post-visit communication.
The planned experience used storytelling, interaction, staff engagement, and digital tools to help visitors connect emotionally with the pandas and understand the relationship between healthy forests, biodiversity, and wildlife conservation.
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Employee Level
Employees from customer experience, animal care, marketing, communications, technology, operations, sales, development, retail, finance, human resources, and volunteer services contributed to the planning process.
Working with shared journey maps and physical prototypes helped teams see how their decisions affected one another, build ownership of the experience, and coordinate around a common vision for opening.
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Organizational Level
The Calgary Zoo gained an integrated experience-planning framework that connected the Panda Passage exhibit with the wider visitor experience across the grounds.
Prioritized concepts, operational considerations, resource requirements, and cross-functional responsibilities created a stronger foundation for leadership decisions, budget planning, and the successful opening of the giant panda experience in 2018.
