In her little black book of contacts, Julie Day has details of a design agency in Bavaria, a shopfitting agency in north-eastern England and numerous homewares purveyors countrywide.

Day has worked at Kuoni for 29 years but it’s only in the past 15 that she has worked as facilities manager for the vertically integrated tour operator.

“A fun part of my job is that I get to go out shopping,” she explains. “Brighton’s North Laine is a great source of inspiration for us. I’ve got a good relationship with a couple of the stores there who will ring me up when they get something new in.”

The Metrocentre branch in Gateshead, which opened in September this year, is one of Day’s favourite stores and among the company’s most technologically advanced.

“We’ve really pushed the boundaries,” she says. “There are no desks, no brochures.”

One wall features a “world window” where 15 plasma screens are laid out in the formation of all seven continents and display videos and social media feeds, as well as information such as flying times and temperatures across the globe.

The store’s travel experts are also armed with 24-inch Samsung touchscreen monitors, which they share with customers.

“It’s all about facilitating the conversation between consultant and customer,” Day says. “[The shared monitors mean] customers can watch every aspect of the booking process. There’s much more interaction.”

But Day notes that Kuoni’s travel experts are far from reliant on technology. The consultants often have small libraries at their disposal, plus there are aspirational images that line the walls to help provide inspiration.

“It’s about making the customer feel the holiday has already started when they walk in the door”

Like many of Kuoni’s other recently opened stores, the Metrocentre branch features a champagne bar, which offers customers glasses of Pierre Mignon in addition to Nespresso coffee or brews from The Indian Tea Company.

“It’s all about making the customer feel the holiday has already started when they walk in the door. There’s nothing nicer than booking your honeymoon with a glass of champagne in hand,” Day says.

A certain level of familiarity and brand identity is maintained throughout all Kuoni shops. “It’s important for us to try and keep the brand consistent but the stores individual. The Kuoni palette features around 20 colours,” she says.

“There’s a spectrum - from terracotta all the way to blues. The muted ‘powdery’ type finish you get from Farrow & Ball paints gives the stores a luxury feel.”

But Day’s role revolves around much more than coffee mornings spent admiring colour swatches or afternoons perusing shopping arcades.

“Each building can present its own little challenges,” she says. At the company’s Bluewater store, Day was faced with two pillars as well as a “skinny” layout. “We put three screens in there to create movement,” she says.

When designing the layout of a shop and all its fittings and fixtures, Day must consider the amount of natural light, as well as the size and shape of the shop. And complying with building regulations and health and safety measures is another critically important aspect of the design process.

Over the years, she has helped source a variety of unusual objects and furnishings - from the sake barrels that form Guildford’s meet-and-greet desk, to an authentic old wooden canoe, which will be converted into a bookshelf at the soon-to-open John Lewis concession in Norwich.

There’s also an Italian-made cobra chair in the Leicester John Lewis concession and a knitted meet-and-greet desk at the Canterbury standalone store. A lot of the unusual items that feature in Kuoni shops are bespoke, though some are sourced through the internet or contacts.

Where do these zany ideas come from? “The inspiration is quite a team effort,” she says. “We use a design agency in Germany that takes care of the look and feel of stores globally, and we work with a superb shopfitting agency. Quirky pieces attract people into the store. It’s fun to put in something that becomes a talking point.”