Virgin Experience Days Unveils Customer-Led Christmas Campaign: ‘This year’s gift. Next year’s story.’

Shot entirely by loyalty members, colleagues, and charity partners, the unfiltered festive campaign champions experiences as the gift of choice this Christmas. 

Virgin Experience Days has launched its Christmas 2026 creative campaign, ‘This year’s gift. Next year’s story.’, abandoning traditional studio sets, scripts, and actors in favour of entirely unfiltered, real-life moments captured by the people who experience them.

To build the campaign, Virgin Experience Days handed creative control to 50 members of its loyalty programme, MemoryMakers+, alongside colleagues and representatives from its network of charity partners. Given free rein across a variety of UK experiences, participants were given a single brief: capture the day on their mobile phones exactly as it unfolded. 

The resulting campaign is built entirely from real customer footage – embracing laughter, mishaps, surprises and spontaneity to showcase the reality of giving and sharing experiences.

Serving as the festive expression of the brand’s core platform, Gift Anti-Ordinary, the campaign puts genuine connection at the fore. Rather than focusing on what’s wrapped under the tree, the creative spotlights experience gifting as the ultimate way to bring people together, reinforcing that the true value of a gift isn’t just unwrapped on Christmas morning, but lived through quality time together and the stories shared for years to come. 

“We deliberately chose not to script this campaign because you can’t manufacture spontaneous joy or authentic connection in a studio. By putting the camera in the hands of our customers, colleagues and charity partners, we’ve captured the real moments that make experiences so powerful. This campaign perfectly brings our ‘Gift Anti-Ordinary’ brand proposition to life, showing that the best gifts don’t just make Christmas Day memorable, they create future stories that live on well beyond the day itself.”

– Danni Rush, CEO, Virgin Experience Days

Virgin Experience Days partnered with creative production company Perspective Pictures to curate and shape the hundreds of raw customer submissions, under the direction of Johnny Webb, CEO and Co-Founder of HiddenLight Productions.

The campaign will run across paid and organic social channels throughout Q4, leading with YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, supported by PR storytelling and CRM activations.

Source: Perspective Pictures

  Campaign, Danni Rush, HiddenLight Productions, Johnny Webb, MemoryMakers+, Perspective Pictures, Virgin Experience Days