IR at WXO Summit: Phantom Peak's Nick Moran, Danny Romeo, and Jonathan Taylor

This article is part of Immersive Rumours' coverage of WXO's London Experience Week 2025.

Phantom Peak is an immersive open-world experience based in Canada Water. Spread over 30,000 sq feet, each season invites guests (or ‘tourists’) to explore the town, complete story trails that involve interacting with the dozen-plus townsfolk, and try to learn more about exactly what the town's mysterious leader, Jonas, is planning for its future. Later this month, the show will begin its 13th season with The Burning Blimp Festival.

During WXO Summit 2025, which was hosted at Phantom Peak, we caught up with Nick Moran (Creative Director), Danny Romeo (Experience Designer/Experience Director), and Jonathan Taylor (Head of Marketing) to discuss what makes Phantom Peak unique, the challenges and benefits of the show’s seasonal model, and the audience’s influence on the show’s design.

Photo: Alistair Veryard

Immersive Rumours: Hi Nick, thanks for speaking with us today. Can you introduce yourself and tell us what you do at Phantom Peak?

Nick Moran: I'm Nick Moran, I'm the Creative Director and Co-Founder of Phantom Peak. My job is twofold. I run the company and also direct the creative by leading the show’s writing team, which is made up of myself, Danny Romeo and Tibet Boyer. I also produce the large amounts of video content in each season of the show as well.

IR: Across the last three days of the WXO Summit, Phantom Peak has been referenced numerous times in talks and conversations as a great example of immersive work that’s had longevity and operates as a successful business, which is often not easily done in this industry. What is it about Phantom Peak that makes it different from other immersive shows, and how has its design allowed the show to run for nearly three years?

Nick: I think there are a few things. Phantom Peak was designed from the ground up to be an open world that people would come to and feel comfortable in and could explore and get lots of different things from. No matter who you are, whether you're young, old, or an ageing hippie, no matter what happens, you can get a different thing from Phantom Peak. That wide audience base helped, as it means the experience is open and accessible to everyone.

Secondly, the seasons. Having it feel like Phantom Peak is in some constant renewal – that's its big strength. It means that we can keep elevating the experience and keep trying to make better and better stories as time goes on. Most people don't get the opportunity to do that. They get one shot at it, and then they have to slowly tweak it as time goes on. We're a bit more fortunate in being able to do something different.

Photo: Alistair Veryard

IR: That idea of doing regular content refreshes is something that I’ve heard AREA15’s Winston Fisher talk about this week. I think he sees it as a fundamental necessity for a show to have longevity. Alongside that, something else Phantom Peak does very well is integrating food and drink options into the show with the cocktail trails. From a business side, that must have been a consideration when you first came up with the concept of the experience.

Nick: Of course. The food and drink aspect was always inevitable, but it's also a duty. It's a four-hour-long show! They literally have to be able to eat and drink. Otherwise, we're basically in a prison camp. It's only fair. I always wanted to create a long show because I believe that dwell time and your emotional relationship with space are interlinked. If you're somewhere for a long time, you develop a relationship with it. Once, I was trapped for 17 hours in Amsterdam Airport, and I hate Amsterdam Airport. Imagine that, but positive – that's Phantom Peak.

[Nick looks over to Jonathan Taylor, Head of Marketing]

Nick: How's that line, Jonathan? Was that successful marketing? Is that staying?

Jonathan: Yeah, funny. Very on brand.

Nick: Good. Thanks, Jonathan.

[Nick turns back to Immersive Rumours]

Nick: He said it was funny, but he didn't even smile, so he didn't think it was that good…

Photo: Alistair Veryard

IR: One aspect as to why people like coming back here again and again, besides the content refreshes, is that, I think, for regular visitors, Phantom Peak may have turned into their third space – that non-home, non-work place to socialise and connect – where they feel comfortable. Is that anything that you've ever given any thought to?

Nick: It was definitely something we wanted to make. We prioritise audience comfort. Although you could argue Turbo the Hedgehog making Terence the Talking Platypus play Russian Roulette is not necessarily audience comfort-focused. I would argue it's not. That just makes me feel comfortable.

Phantom Peak is all about the audience; it’s somewhere where people feel safe to play. We always knew that those things would inevitably lead to somewhere that some people really wanted to come back to over and over. We didn't quite know that the volume of people or the strength of feeling that some audience would have would be so strong, which is incredibly flattering. This strange system and experience that we built and put together really has made people very happy. That's really very gratifying.

That third space element, in those terms, I haven't really thought about, but it's definitely something that was planned out with a different metric.

IR: We’re coming to the end of this current season, JonaCon, and The Burning Blimp Festival is right around the corner. How’s the planning for the new season going?

Nick: The season is completely finished. We're ready to go. The season is ready to go. We've made all the content. Generally, we finish a season 14 months in advance… [laughs]

Genuinely, the season is being finalised, but we are actually the most ahead of it for a season we’ve ever been. Wintermas last year was really hard to write... That's the season we always end up coming really close to the wire because going from Halloween to Winter is really hard, as they’re so close together.

I can't work on two seasons at the same time. It's just too many stories; we lose focus, and we start to play against each other. That's one of the things that we're trying to get better at, but it’s the start of May, and we’ve finished the season three weeks ahead of launch, which is very good for us.

IR: Earlier today, I saw you, Danny, and Tibet having a discussion about some of the specifics for one of next season's trails, so how do you define a trail being done?

Nick: You should think of our seasons like an order book. Once we’ve worked out the main beats and everything that we need in those beats, that trail is done. Eight of our ten-ish trails are now in call-outs, which is us saying that they're done. That's us saying we're committing to these things getting made. There might be small tweaks along the way, but generally it's quite rare. We might swap a character out or change a poster, but it's minor things that we'll find out in previews.

Photo: Alistair Veryard

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Immersive Rumours: Hi Danny, thanks for speaking with us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us what you do at Phantom Peak?

Danny Romeo: My name is Danny Romeo. I am Experience Designer and Experience Director at Phantom Peak. That essentially means that I'm on the writing team, and I'm the Performance Director as well. I'm also kind of the key spokesperson between the writing team and other departments. I oversee a lot of the execution of ideas.

IR: You've been with Phantom Peak since the first season, and over that time, which is nearly three years, the show has evolved and grown massively. How is it trying to turn around new seasons with such regularity?

Danny: Yeah. I mean, the turnaround is quite quick. We've actually not struggled with it that much. I think it all comes down to the fact that we've created a very deep and nuanced world with a lot of different personalities and a lot of things happening behind the scenes. It gives us a lot of area to explore. But also, all of our characters grow a little bit each season, which means they always have something new going on in their lives. They've got new struggles and new challenges that we have to help them overcome.

The turnaround is usually just about going, ‘ Okay, let's take what happened last season. How has that changed this character? How are they reacting to that personally? What does that present to them moving forward? And how can we explore that in a way where the audience can actively help them solve that problem?’ In that way, the town just becomes a living, breathing place that kind of grows on its own, and we just follow it and document it.

Photo: Alistair Veryard

IR: One of the things we mentioned in our review of this current season is that the design of Phantom Peak allows you to take feedback from what audiences really enjoy about previous seasons and build on it in the next season. We’ve seen this recently with characters like Sherlock Bones, who audiences seem to love and has returned this season for a new trail. How do you take the audience's response to a current season and integrate it into the next?

Danny: Yeah, it's a balance. We did strike gold with Sherlock Bones. People seemed to really react to that, which is great because we have a lot of different stories that we can tell with him. It's that perfect balance of we found something that people really like, and also, we have a character that has the flexibility that we can do a lot more with them and explore a lot further with them.

We do take a lot of audience feedback into account when making new seasons. That has changed things on a basic logistical level. People complained about walking a lot, so we made a much stronger effort to make sure that steps were in similar parts of town before sending them across. That changed the way we shape our story structure. We made a point of linking things together to create a vibe of investigating a specific part of town and then opening up the world as a story structure beat in direct response to people saying that they were walking so much.

Things like the mid-show games with tokens are a direct response to people saying that they didn't feel like they were engaging with other audience members quite as much, so we created this more communal vibe. It's really affected every aspect of the way we make the show.

But also, there are things that we have to keep for ourselves. For instance, some characters get really popular, and there just isn't that much to do with them, so we do have to have them take a bit of a backseat, and hopefully bring them back later when we've gotten to a point where there is more to do with them. But yeah, the audience influences the show just as much as anybody else does.

IR: Do you think that way of working, where there are constant updates, is something that basically every experience, whether it be open world or linear, can take something from?

Danny: I think it really depends on the show. If you take Punchdrunk, for instance, they get a lot of mileage out of their repeatability within the model. They hide secrets and storylines within one singular experience so they don't have to update, and that's enough to bring people back because they want to investigate those secrets, and they want their own singular experience – something that they get to see that nobody else got to see.

With us, because we are a slightly more linear experience. Yes, you can go anywhere; yes, you can look at anything, but we do have our 10 set trails, which are a bit more limiting in that we should refresh content if we want continued repeat business, because we have to give people new things to explore. If we only ever had the same 10 trails for a whole year, people might not come back as much because they've already seen those trails within 3-4 visits.

I would say it’s a show structure thing, but it's also a… this is a bit weird to say, it's an earned thing. Theatre is a business, and ultimately the open market decides what shows succeed and what don't. I would say that theres' some shows out there that are doing well enough with their first run, but they aren't necessarily getting that kind of dedicated fan base. I would say it would be dangerous for a show like that to repeat and refresh their content all the time because they haven't quite gotten that loyalty yet.

If the experience they're offering to a new group of people is vastly different from their first experience, they're not going to build on that word of mouth that they previously had. It might not be the same quality of content because they haven't quite found their feet yet. Once you've been in business for a while and you know what your audience is looking for and you know there’s a dedicated fan base, then you’ve probably earned the opportunity to do completely new content and bring people back for more and more visits.

Photo: Alistair Veryard

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IR: Hi Jonathan. Thanks for speaking with us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us what you do at Phantom Peak?

Jonathan Taylor: I’m Jonathan Taylor. My job title is Head of Marketing at Phantom Peak, which essentially means that I lead on marketing and comms for The League of Adventure, which is the company that sits over Phantom Peak. My job is basically to keep the ball rolling with ticket sales, keep people coming back, and ensure that what we're saying is interesting, informative and enough to convince people to buy tickets.

IR: From a marketing perspective, does the structure of Phantom Peak – in that the content and storyline of the show resets every three months – make it easier or harder to market than a show that didn’t have such regular seasonal updates? 

Jonathan: It's easier and harder. Every three to four months, we have a reason to go back out to press, go back out to influencers, creators, and the industry to get fresh coverage. Each new season is a point at which, as a business, everything changes. Our menu changes, our stories change, the set changes, the video content changes, and the characters change, so it’s a good opportunity to relaunch.

We have 30% of people come back, which is, I think, an industry record. It’s insane. 30% of the audience at any one time have been to Phantom Peak before. The season's help with that because we have a lot of people who like to complete everything, so when we relaunch 10 new trails, they want to try and do them all, complete it all, get all the stories, and know what's going on. It's easy in that sense.

At the same time, there are challenges. For the 70% of people who have never been to Phantom Peak before, us saying, ‘Hey, you're coming to JonaCon’, for example, means they might ask, ‘What's JonaCon?’. We have to explain that we're a seasonal show, and people might go, ‘Does that mean if I come now, I'm going to miss out because I'm not coming at Christmas or Halloween?’. It’s about trying to balance the idea that if you don't want to come to every season, you're not going to miss out by coming to just one season. Because we're relaunching all the time, people get confused. It's trying to unpack that in as few words as possible, while also being fun and interesting and informative.

Photo: Alistair Veryard

IR: How do you go about making it clear that the show is ongoing, but the content changes regularly?

Jonathan: We've done a bit of a shift recently. We used to focus a lot on seasons – seasons were everything. We would change our logo with each new season. Now, we don't do that. Phantom Peak is the thing that's consistent. It's always the same structure. You're always going to do trails, you're always going to do new things. You have to come three or four times in a three-month period to complete a season, so that means for most people, it's a different show every single time. When you pay £45 for a ticket, you know you're always going to get a different experience.

IR: Yeah. If people don't visit with every new season, and then they mention the show to a friend, all of the information that they had in their head about what the show is may be out of date when it comes to the trails and storylines.

Jonathan: Yeah, that's true. It's like saying, ‘I did this thing at Phantom Peak; you should go and do it yourself.’ There's no guarantee that they're going to be on the same trail, that they're going to meet the same characters, or have the same experience.

One thing we're trying to look into at the moment is guiding the audience and feeding them the way they should talk about Phantom Peak, which is a really impossible task. We’ve recently started sending out surveys, which have very specific questions worded in a specific way to try and get not only the content across, but more of the feeling across, and trying to educate audiences afterwards. That's part of the whole return thing that we've got going on.

The fan-run Discord Community is a huge thing with that too, trying to reinforce how we speak about Phantom Peak so that when other people are talking about Phantom Peak, everyone's using the same shared language. We often adopt how the community speaks about it and then might change that in a way that works for us, and then regurgitate it. It's about servicing the community and listening to the community, but also helping the new people who are joining the community for the first time or visiting for the first time and wanting to come back, having the right words to describe it. It's a challenge, but we're trying.

Photo: Alistair Veryard

IR: Phantom Peak is now in its 12th season and has a huge amount of lore to draw from. More often than not, that lore feeds into the marketing communications, especially the emails, which all match the show’s in-world tone and act as an extension of the show’s universe. From your side, how do you navigate that?

Jonathan: We try to send an email once a week, and we try to send it to people who are engaged with us. When we're going out to people, we're always conscious that they're probably not in a sales mood, so they don't want a sales email, and we have to make it fun.

With Phantom Peak, we really are not a very serious company. We're a serious business in the sense that we have to make money, and we are always looking at how we can ensure we're delivering the best experience in a professional, high-quality way, but at the same time, we're not a very serious company. We'll come up with an idea and try it out to see if it works, matching the tone of the show.

Basically, we want to be consistent. We want to be Phantom Peak whenever we're speaking to people. The secret is that we don't really have a clear reason for why we do that. It's just that we're fun. If we're going out to someone who's not bought a ticket, we want to give the tone of what Phantom Peak is, and if we're going out to returners, they already know the tone of Phantom because they've done a trail, they've watched a video, so if we're matching that, it just feels like an extension and something that’s inviting them to come back.

If we send an email and we get people in the Discord community or elsewhere say, ‘This is hilarious’ or ‘This is funny’, it doesn't need a click, and it doesn't need a purchase off the back of it; it's enough for it to just keep people engaged.

Photo: Alistair Veryard

Recently we invented a character called Philip from Marketing, who doesn't exist. I just decided that we needed a scapegoat for something, so I found a stock video of a guy cheering, and I thought it was hilarious. I spent, like, 30 minutes laughing at it. I downloaded it, turned it into a GIF and put it in an email. We came up with an idea, and suddenly, he has a voice and a character.

My uncle in New York sent me a message yesterday saying, ‘That Philip, he's really difficult; maybe you should get rid of him.’ He's only been to Phantom Peak once, and he's not going to buy a ticket, but he messaged me out of the blue saying, ‘Oh, Philip's up to his old tricks.’

IR: If your family is signed up for the mailing list, they know what you’re up to at work! That’s a much easier way for them to see what you’re doing than updating them all when you see them…

Jonathan: Yeah, it's another way to check in with family, isn't it? Sign them up for the mailing list, send them an email saying, ‘Oh, could you just test this email for me?’ and then we've got their data too!

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Phantom Peak's new season, The Burning Blimp Festival, runs from 23rd May to 7th September 2025 in Canada Water. To find out more about the show and to book tickets, visit phantompeak.com

This interview is part of Immersive Rumours' coverage of the World Experience Summit and London Experience Week 2025, which has been made possible thanks to the World Experience Organization