Four very different guests, walking through the same resort.

One resort, several completely different jobs to do.

A property at this scale isn't serving one kind of guest, it's running several distinct experiences in parallel under one roof: high-value gaming, leisure and romance, and business travel, each with its own expectations for what a smooth stay feels like. Designing for "the guest" as a single archetype tends to produce a resort that's pleasant for no one in particular. I approached this as a persona and journey-mapping exercise first, so that any service design or digital product work that follows is grounded in what specific guests actually do, think, and feel at each stage of their visit, not an averaged guess.

The three personas below, a VIP gaming guest, a milestone leisure couple, and a convention attendee, represent meaningfully different jobs the resort has to do well at the same time.

Start with real behavior, not a marketing segment.

Marketing segments (demographics, spend tier, booking channel) are useful for targeting, but they don't tell you what a guest actually does at 11pm on the second night of their stay. I built these personas around behavior and motivation: what triggers the trip, what "going well" looks like moment to moment, and where the resort's own complexity, multiple towers, dozens of restaurants, a convention center, a casino floor, becomes friction instead of abundance. Each persona is paired with a journey map that walks through five stages of the stay, surfacing what's working, what's breaking down, and where there's room to design something better.

Four guests, four completely different definitions of a good stay.

Elena is a VIP gaming guest whose entire experience runs through a personal host relationship. Danielle and Marcus are first-time luxury guests celebrating an anniversary, discovering an enormous property at their own pace. Raj is a convention attendee trying to make his logistics disappear so he can focus on three days of back-to-back meetings. Ava is a nightlife seeker traveling with a friend group, there for the dayclub, the table, and the photos that prove it. None of them are having the same trip, and none of them should be designed for the same way.

Walking each guest's stay, stage by stage.

For every persona, I mapped what they're doing, thinking, and feeling across five stages of their visit, along with the pain points and opportunities at each one. Use the tabs below to move between Elena, Danielle & Marcus, Raj, and Ava's journeys.

The research informed a set of design explorations.

The personas and journey maps from this project directly shaped exploratory redesigns of the Wynn booking flow and casino experience pages, showing how a guest-intent-driven approach changes information hierarchy, content prioritization, and key CTAs across both surfaces.

How to start a persona and customer journey project.

Clients often ask where to actually begin when they know they need personas and journey maps but haven't done this kind of work before. Here's the approach I use to get from "we should probably do this" to something the whole organization can actually use.

Starting a persona project

• 1. Align on what a persona needs to do. Before any research, get stakeholders to agree on the decisions personas are supposed to inform. A persona built to guide marketing messaging looks different from one built to guide product prioritization.
• 2. Ground it in real behavior, not assumptions. Pull from existing data (CRM, support tickets, reviews, analytics) and supplement with direct research, interviews, shadowing, or contextual inquiry, so personas reflect what people actually do, not what the team assumes about them.
• 3. Look for meaningfully different jobs, not just different demographics. Two guests with the same income and age can want completely different things from the same visit. Segment by motivation and behavior first.
• 4. Keep the number small and distinct. Three to five personas that are genuinely different from each other are more useful than eight that blur together. If two personas would make the same decisions, they're one persona.
• 5. Validate before you socialize. Check draft personas against the people who interact with these guests daily, front desk, hosts, support staff, before rolling them out organization-wide. They'll catch what the research missed.

Starting a customer journey mapping project

• 1. Pick one persona and one journey at a time. Trying to map every persona's entire relationship with the brand at once produces something too broad to act on. Start with the highest-stakes or highest-friction journey for your most important persona.
• 2. Define the stages before filling in detail. Walk the journey at a high level first (discovery, arrival, core experience, departure, or whatever fits your context) before diving into what happens at each one.
• 3. Capture does, thinks, feels, not just touchpoints. A list of touchpoints tells you where something happens. Adding what the person is doing, thinking, and feeling at each one tells you why it matters and where the emotional stakes are highest.
• 4. Mark pain points and opportunities as you go, not after. It's tempting to map the current state neutrally and analyze it later, but the friction is easiest to spot in the moment you're mapping it.
• 5. Treat the map as a living document. A journey map that gets built once and archived stops being useful the moment the product changes. The teams that get the most value revisit and update it as the experience evolves.

What these personas and journeys are for.

On their own, personas and journey maps are a diagnostic, not a deliverable. The real value shows up in what happens next: prioritizing which friction points actually matter, designing service and product changes around a specific guest's stakes rather than a generic one, and giving cross-functional teams, front desk, hosts, digital product, marketing, a shared, evidence-based picture of who they're actually serving. For a property with as many distinct guest types as this one, that shared picture is what keeps three very different experiences from being designed as if they were one.