“Where is the actual campus?”
“This is the campus.”
“No, I mean the real campus.”
“This is the real campus.”

This conversation has become surprisingly common since Haaga-Helia’s RestoCamp opened in Tripla in August 2026. For many exchange students, studying in a shopping centre is not what they expect a university campus to look like. Our students who studied one or two years at Haaga feel the same. The surprise is understandable.

Until 2026, Haaga-Helia’s hospitality management education in Helsinki was based at the Haaga campus, in a 1969 building in a quiet residential district (Haaga-Helia 2024). The restaurants, hotels and events students studied there reached the classroom as case studies, guest lecturers and company visits.

RestoCamp turns that arrangement upside down. Learning now takes place in Tripla, the shopping, hotel, office and housing complex at Pasila railway station (Haaga-Helia 2026). In this text, we compare the two campuses as learning environments.

A living laboratory for experience design

For those teaching hospitality, tourism, service business, and experience design, Tripla offers something difficult to recreate in a conventional classroom. At Haaga, reaching a busy service environment meant organising a trip. In Tripla, customer journeys, service encounters, events, restaurants, cafés, and entertainment services are only a few steps away.

When discussing experience design, students do not need to imagine a customer experience. They can observe one. When analysing service encounters, examples are happening all around them. Even the cinema next door provides a useful starting point for discussions about customer journeys, emotional touchpoints, and designing memorable experiences.

The environment becomes part of the lesson. After our first months in Tripla, this is still mostly potential: students see around them what has been discussed in class. The next step is to turn it into course tasks.

Educational theory has long suggested that learning becomes more meaningful when it is connected to authentic contexts (Lave & Wenger, 1991). More recent research on authentic learning environments similarly highlights the value of connecting learning to real-world settings and future professional practice (Herrington et al., 2014; Nachtigall & Wirth, 2024).

Shopping centre Tripla offers exactly this kind of setting, and hospitality education already has models for using it. At the Polytechnic of Porto, hotel and restaurant management students built their own checklists, visited restaurants as ordinary customers and presented the service gaps they found (Vasconcelos et al., 2025). In Tripla, a task like this fits inside a single lesson.

Learning among other happenings

Teaching in a shopping centre also changes the atmosphere of learning.

The Haaga campus was quiet, which suited concentration. In Tripla, there is always something happening. Commuters rush towards trains, visitors arrive for events, families search for lunch options, and tourists try to find the correct exit. The environment constantly reminds students that the concepts discussed in class are connected to actual people and real situations.

This aligns with the idea of learning as a social and situated activity, shaped by participation and interaction (Brown et al., 1989). Sometimes a discussion about service quality becomes richer when students can immediately connect it to observations from their surroundings.

Or, to put it less academically, meaningful background noise can occasionally be more inspiring than perfect silence.

More than a new address

Of course, learning in the middle of a shopping centre is not always effortless. Teachers may move between the Pasila campus and Tripla during the same day, and students often do the same. The short walk between the sites gives flexibility in where each part of a course happens, but it also requires careful scheduling.

The most significant aspect of RestoCamp may not be the location itself, but what it encourages us to rethink about learning. When Costa and Steffgen (2020) compared students before and after a campus move, satisfaction with the physical environment rose, yet the move itself did not reliably predict how students rated their learning environment.

For educators in hospitality and experience-related fields, proximity creates opportunities once it is built into courses: observation tasks with clear questions, interviews with service staff, and projects commissioned by businesses in the building. We welcome partners in Tripla to join that work.

And sometimes the best lesson on experience design is not found in a case study. Sometimes it is unfolding next to the cinema, around the corner from a restaurant, and somewhere between a customer journey and a train departure announcement. At Haaga, we brought that material into the classroom. In Tripla, our task is to send students out of it with a clear question. That is what will make RestoCamp more than a new address.

Image: Haaga-Helia