The Airport Test

If you want to understand a culture, don’t read its constitution. Don’t study its GDP. Spend 30 minutes at its airport.

Airports are the most condensed, exaggerated versions of national character. They’re pressure cookers where design, behavior, and ambition collide in plain sight. In Helsinki, my home base, you’ll notice the silence. You'll also notice it's clean, and everything works (well, almost every time). Northern Europeans are known for designing for functionality, and Helsinki is no exception. Finns glide through security as if competing for a world record in non-verbal efficiency. Nobody talks loudly. Even the announcements feel like polite suggestions.

Contrast this with JFK, where the background hum is closer to a construction site. Or Heathrow, where the whole terminal seems permanently one delay away from collective revolt. Or Miami (where I used to live), don't even get me started. Hot. Chaotic. You have to love it. But not so much after a few visits.

Land in Berlin, and you’re greeted by the opposite: a brand-new airport that opened nine years late, riddled with cost overruns, still struggling with basic signage. It tells you something about German ambition today versus the myth of German efficiency.

Airports also reveal our relationship to time. In the U.S., travelers sprint barefoot through TSA like they’re late for war. In Japan, boarding resembles a tea ceremony — quiet, precise, orderly. In Italy, the boarding announcement is more of a suggestion; you’ll get on eventually, after an espresso and a bit of shouting.

Sorry my American friends, but your airports are the ugliest, oldest out there. Everything is just off (don't get me started with immigration officers). Unfortunately, they give us a glimpse into the system that in so many ways is broken. Just being real here.

For entrepreneurs, airports are more than anthropological curiosities. They’re metaphors for how we design experiences. Consider the moments of friction: the endless security checks, the bottlenecks at boarding, the inexplicable disappearance of luggage. Every step is a reminder that design is destiny. A badly designed process creates stress and inefficiency at scale. A well-designed one, like at Helsinki or Tokyo Haneda, feels almost invisible — a choreography of millions of people moving as if in unison.

What fascinates me most is how airports double as cathedrals of ambition. Nations build them not only to move people but to signal something to the world. The glittering terminals of the Gulf states aren’t just about passengers; they’re about prestige. They whisper: we matter, we're going places, we have money. Lots of it. The same logic drives entrepreneurs to build offices they can’t afford or websites dripping with unnecessary animation. It’s signaling, pure and simple.

And then there’s the human theater. Airports expose the contradictions of globalization better than any Davos panel. The luxury goods store next to the budget airline gate. The family of six living on McDonald’s trays while the business traveler sips champagne in the lounge. The juxtaposition of aspiration and reality, hope and fatigue, all compressed into one terminal.

Whenever I land somewhere new, I watch the airport first, not the city. How they manage flow, how they treat their citizens and visitors, what they choose to showcase or hide. It’s the fastest cultural diagnostic you’ll ever find. Call it the Airport Test: if you want to know how a society works — or how a business works — watch how it handles people under pressure.

Because in the end, we’re all just travelers moving through designed systems. The question, for nations and entrepreneurs alike, is whether those systems reveal our best selves — or our worst.

Oh how I wish we had better airport design around the world. It's a reality check of culture, and the country's dedication to functional design.

What do you think?