London Experience Week is the most useful annual gathering for senior buyers and builders in the experience economy. Run by the World Experience Organisation, it convenes a tightly curated group of producers, operators, and studio principals from around the world for a week of sessions, behind-the-scenes tours of London’s most ambitious experiences, and the kind of conversations that don’t happen at trade shows.

The 2025 edition sold out. The 2026 edition is about to happen. With a year of perspective on what stood out, here’s what’s still useful from last year.

Why this conference matters more than it sounds

LXW operates at a scale most events in this industry don’t. Roughly 750 experience leaders from over 40 countries gather for a week, with case studies, peer conversations, and behind-the-scenes tours of London’s most ambitious immersive and experiential productions. The signal-to-noise ratio is unusual. The technology vendors don’t dominate the conversation, the producers do. The format is built around the people who actually fund and commission the work, not the people who supply it.

This is the conference I recommend most often to senior producers who are trying to understand where the experience economy is moving. It does what the larger trade shows can’t — it puts the people who pay for the work in a room with the people who make it, at small enough scale that real conversations happen.

What the 2025 edition was about

Three themes ran through the week.

The shift from attractions to experiences as a category. A significant portion of the conversation in 2025 was about how the traditional attractions industry — theme parks, museums, branded experiences — is being repositioned around the language and design principles of the experience economy. The producers behind the most ambitious projects are increasingly thinking in terms of attendee transformation, repeat-visit dynamics, and emotional arc rather than the older attraction-industry vocabulary of throughput, footprint, and spend-per-visitor.

This is not a marketing change. It’s a real shift in how the industry’s leading projects are being designed. The studios that can speak both vocabularies — and translate between them — are positioned for the next decade of work.

The IP question. Several sessions and a lot of hallway conversation in 2025 dealt with the role of intellectual property in immersive experiences. Netflix House, Harry Potter The Exhibition, the Stranger Things stage adaptations — the IP-driven experiential category is growing fast. The producers in the room split sharply on what to make of it. Some saw it as the dominant frame for the next five years; others saw it as a structural risk that crowds out the original work the industry should be commissioning.

I came away thinking the truth is somewhere in between. IP-driven experiences will dominate certain categories — entertainment, fan engagement, family attractions. Original work will continue to dominate others — cultural institutions, transformational events, civic placemaking. The studios that try to do both well will probably do neither. The studios that pick a side will be more interesting.

The measurement problem. The most useful single session of the week, for me, was on measurement. The senior producers in the room were unanimous that the current measurement stack — attendance, dwell time, social mentions, NPS — is inadequate for the work that’s actually being commissioned now. Producers want to measure attendee transformation, but the survey instruments to do that are immature. Producers want to measure brand category lift, but the attribution is harder than the marketing teams admit.

There’s a real opening for studios that can help producers think about measurement at the same time they’re thinking about design. The integration of measurement into the design phase — what behavior change does this experience aim to produce, and how will we know — is going to be a competitive advantage for the studios that build it in.

The Safari

The behind-the-scenes Safari is the part of LXW that’s hardest to describe and most useful to attend. A curated programme of studio visits and behind-the-scenes tours across some of London’s most ambitious immersive and experiential projects. You see how the work actually got made — the production decisions, the failure points, the design compromises that don’t make it into the press.

What I took from the 2025 Safari, more than any specific tour, was a renewed appreciation for the gap between the published version of an immersive project and the real version. Most projects look more decisive in their case studies than they were in their production. The ones that look effortless almost always took longer and cost more than the public record suggests.

For producers, this is useful to know. The studios that talk honestly about the messiness of their projects are the ones who have actually done the work.

What I’m taking into 2026

The attractions-to-experiences shift is real. Clients who haven’t repositioned for it yet are working from an outdated playbook.

The IP question forces a strategic choice. The studios that decide what kind of work they want to be doing — IP-driven or original — will produce better work than the ones who try to do both.

Measurement is the next competitive frontier. The studios that integrate measurement into the design phase will have an advantage I expect to compound over the next three years.

LXW remains the conference I recommend more than any other. If you have a flagship project on your 2026 calendar and the budget for one trip to compare notes with peers, this is the one.

Alt Ethos works with a small number of producers each year on flagship immersive projects. To start a conversation: [CTA link]