Christmas in the Cotswolds, a Content Showcase

Key takeaways

A Christmas stay is one of the easiest things to film well: the table, the presents, the walk and the pub tell the story without a script.
Festive content is best filmed this Christmas to sell next Christmas, because people book a season well before it starts.
The detail people remember is rarely the biggest room. On this trip it was a bathtub in the bedroom and a pub that rescued a day when the buses did not run.
Honest hiccups, such as missing transport, build trust when they come with the practical fix a traveller needs.
A creator brief for a festive stay should cover timing, a shot list, permissions for filming in public places and how the post will be labelled if anything was given for free.

Why we share this trip

We first wrote about this Christmas in January 2024 as a personal diary. Velena, Dragos and Dragos's family, who had flown in from Rome, spent Christmas Eve to 27 December in a rented cottage in Chipping Norton, a market town in the West Oxfordshire part of the Cotswolds, with a day at each end in Oxford. We filmed the whole thing for our travel channel.

We have rewritten the post because the trip is a clear example of what we make for hotels, holiday lets, pubs and destinations. Nobody commissioned it. That is exactly why it is useful: it shows how a real stay looks through a lens, what a camera picks out that a brochure misses, and what a property or a place could do with the same material if it had briefed us.

So this is not a travel review. The places are real and the dates are real, but the questions we answer are the ones a hotel manager, a cottage owner or a tourism officer asks us: what would you film, why would it work on Instagram or TikTok, and how do we brief someone to do it for us? Where we give practical facts, such as bus times or opening rules, they have been checked again for October 2026 and linked to their source.

If you only want the short version: a festive stay gives a creator more natural story than almost any other kind of trip, and most of that story happens in the small moments rather than the big rooms. The rest of this page explains how to make use of that.

Four days, day by day

Here is what actually happened, kept from the original post and told plainly. The order matters, because the order is also the shape of the film we made.

24 December: London to Chipping NortonWe took the bus from London Victoria to Oxford. With suitcases in tow there was little time to explore, so we stopped at a pub restaurant for tea and a catch up before carrying on to Chipping Norton. The cottage we had booked on Airbnb was a gem. We cooked a festive dinner for Christmas Eve, opened wine, played games and, since nobody had the patience to wait until morning, exchanged presents.
25 December: a slow Christmas DayDragos cooked Christmas breakfast. We walked around Chipping Norton in the rain, past the decorations, and came back to the warmth of the cottage. Its surprise was a freestanding bathtub in the bedroom, which became the highlight of the day. The afternoon was Uno, quizzes and board games until the lights came on.
26 December: the day the buses did not runWe had planned a day in Oxford, but there were no buses. Instead we found a walk from Chipping Norton out to the village of Over Norton and back, a muddy, festive lane that became one of the best parts of the trip. Back in town we ended up at The Fox, a busy pub on the Market Place, for starters, sharing platters, soup and mains, with enough left over for dinner.
27 December: OxfordWe tidied the cottage, packed, and this time the bus to Oxford ran. We walked the old centre, saw the Bodleian Library, and took the family to lunch at the Turf Tavern, where the mac and cheese and the garlic bread were the favourites, before heading back to London.

Dragos Nistor and Velena Nikolova wheeling suitcases down an Oxford street, from behind — The arrival shot: suitcases on an Oxford street on Christmas Eve.

Read as a list, it is a very ordinary family Christmas. Read as a shot list, it is a complete story with a beginning (the journey in), a middle with a problem (no buses on Boxing Day), a turn (the walk and the pub) and an ending (the city and the journey home). That shape is what makes a travel film watchable, and it happened on its own. A good creator notices it while it is happening and films the pieces.

The cottage itself has its own page: our Chipping Norton cottage showcase goes room by room through what we photographed and why. And if you want to see the town in a quieter month, our four days in Chipping Norton in November covers the same streets a few weeks earlier, from a different cottage.

What we filmed, and why each piece earns its place

The result was an 11 minute film, Christmas and New Year in the Cotswolds, on our travel channel, plus the photographs on this page. Nothing was staged. What we did do, as we always do on a stay, was film each moment in a few deliberate kinds of shot, so that the edit had choices.

The journey inSuitcases, a bus window, a first look at the town. A viewer needs to arrive with you, and a property needs to look reachable. Ten seconds of travel does both.

The tableBreakfast in yellow mugs, a cheese board and a glass of red wine. Food on a table says "you will be comfortable here" faster than any room tour.

The peoplePresents being opened, family on the sofa, a Christmas selfie. A stay is sold on how it feels to be there with the people you love, and only people can show that.

The detailA silver present with a red ribbon, a small tree under the stairs, the bath in the bedroom. Details are what get saved and shared, because they are what people want to copy.

The place outsideA muddy lane, the stone of the town, the pinnacles of the Bodleian under a grey sky. A cottage or hotel is always partly selling where it is.

The plateSharing boards, soup and a burger at the pub. Food close up is the most reliable short video there is, and it gives a pub something to post for weeks.

A cottage breakfast of sausages, bread, olives and tea in yellow mugs — Christmas breakfast at the cottage: the kind of frame a holiday let can post every December.

From one long film you can cut many short ones. On a stay like this we would normally expect to take a set of vertical Reels and TikToks from the same footage: the arrival, the table, the presents, the walk, the pub, the city. Instagram now allows Reels of up to three minutes, as Instagram's head announced in January 2025 (reported by Business Today), but most of what travels furthest is still much shorter, built around one moment.

The long film has a different job. It sits on YouTube and on a property's own website, where someone who is close to booking watches all of it. Short cuts bring people in; the long film helps them decide. That is why our hotel packages are built around a property film with Reels cut from the same footage, rather than one or the other.

Two of the frames here show how much a single moment can carry. The Christmas breakfast above has no people in it at all, yet it tells you the cottage has a proper kitchen, room for a family at the table, and a host who left good mugs. The Bodleian pinnacles further down tell you the cottage is a bus ride from one of the most photographed cities in the country. Neither took more than a few seconds to shoot. The skill is in knowing, while you are standing there, that this is a frame worth stopping for.

Watch our hospitality films

Tap a video to play it. Our Cotswolds Christmas film sits in the same set as these, and there is more on our hotels and restaurants work page.

The Dolomites and the Leitlhof hotel, the full film

Why festive content sells, and when to film it

Social media now does a large part of the job a travel brochure used to do. In a 2026 survey of travellers in the UK, Spain and Italy, TUI Musement found that 43 percent had booked a trip because of a viral post or video, and that almost half of Gen Z travellers (48 percent) turn to TikTok for travel inspiration, as reported by Euronews. A Christmas stay is exactly the kind of moment people save and come back to when they plan their own.

The catch is timing. People book a festive break weeks or months ahead, so a property that films its Christmas in December and posts it in December is selling to people who have already booked somewhere else. The useful rule is to film this Christmas to sell next Christmas. The footage from December 2023 would have done its best work for a cottage from late summer 2024 onwards, when people were choosing where to spend the following Christmas.

We set out how to work backwards from the booking window in our guide to planning a hotel's seasonal content campaign. In short: decide which season you are selling, find when people book it, and make sure the content exists before that date. For Christmas, that almost always means filming one year and posting the next, with a few fresh posts in December itself to show the place is open and busy.

Festive footage also has a long tail. A frame of a tree under the stairs or a breakfast table in yellow mugs is not tied to one year, so it can be reused for several winters, as long as the property still looks the same. That is one reason we hand over the footage and stills rather than only finished posts: a property that owns its Christmas content can bring it back every autumn.

One more thing makes Christmas easier to film than people expect: the light. Winter days are short, but a cottage lit by lamps and fairy lights, and a town with its decorations up, look warm on camera in a way summer rarely does. A creator can film the outside in the brief daylight and the inside from mid afternoon, and both feel like Christmas.

What a cottage or holiday let can learn

Two family members on the striped sofa of the cottage at Christmas with presents and wine — Presents and wine on the sofa: the moment a family Christmas is sold on.

The cottage we stayed in did several things right without trying, and each one turned into content. These are the lessons we would pass to any owner of a holiday let, large or small.

Have one feature people talk aboutThe bathtub in the bedroom was the thing everyone mentioned, filmed and remembered. Most properties have one feature like it: a window seat, a fireplace, a view, a hot tub. Make it the first frame of every video, and make sure it is clean, lit and ready on the day a creator arrives.

Show the table, not only the roomsWide shots of empty rooms all look alike. A table set for breakfast, or a board of cheese and wine, shows how the space is used. A listing that includes a couple of these feels lived in.

Think about groups and familiesA Christmas cottage is often booked by several generations together. Content that shows a family on the sofa or round a board game tells that buyer the property suits them, which a picture of a double bed never can.

Leave room for the seasonA small tree and a few lights were enough to make the cottage feel like Christmas on camera. Seasonal touches cost little and give every post a reason to exist in that month.

Be walkable, and say soBeing in the middle of town meant we could walk to the pub, the shops and the countryside in the rain. Location is a feature, and it films best with the walk itself, not a map pin.

If you run several properties, or a cottage brand with many owners, the same lessons scale. We plan and post social media for Snaptrip Group, whose brands include some of the UK's best known cottage and staycation sites, and the content that does best for a stay is the same at any size: a real moment, in a real room, with the season in it.

A word on guests' privacy. The family pictures on this page are ours and shown with permission. A property that wants to use guests' own photos or videos should always ask first and in writing, and should never post a guest's face without a clear yes. Commissioning a creator avoids the question entirely, because the people on camera are the people you hired.

It also helps to think about who will see the content. A holiday let's Instagram is followed by past guests, people who saved a post months ago, and people who have never heard of it. Each needs something slightly different: past guests like to see the place again in a new season, savers need a nudge with dates and availability, and new people need the one feature that makes them stop. A single Christmas shoot can give all three, if the creator knows to film for them.

What a pub can learn from Boxing Day at The Fox

Sharing boards of bread, sausages and dips on a pub table in Oxford, hands reaching in — Hands reaching into the sharing boards: the frame that sells a long lunch.

When the buses failed on the 26th, a pub rescued the day. The Fox on the Market Place in Chipping Norton was packed, and we ate our way through starters, sharing platters, soup and mains. It is a Hook Norton Brewery pub with a restaurant serving breakfast, lunch and dinner and ten bedrooms upstairs, according to the brewery, so it is a pub, a restaurant and a small hotel at once.

That busy room is content in its own right. A full pub on Boxing Day tells a viewer two things at once: the food is good, and they should book. For a pub, the lesson is to film the busiest days, not the quiet ones, and to film hands reaching into the food rather than a plate on its own. The sharing boards above are a far stronger post than a neat plate with nobody near it.

The second lesson is about leftovers. We left with enough for dinner, which is a small, very human detail and exactly the kind of thing people comment on. Generous portions, a busy room and a fire on a wet day are what a country pub is selling. A creator who eats there as a guest captures them naturally.

For pubs and restaurants we offer packages built around exactly this. Our guide to filming food on video explains how dishes are shot so they sell, and our restaurant content packages range from a short session on your signature dishes to a monthly arrangement.

Restaurant Content: Menu Spotlight£650for the sessionUp to 3 hours on your signature dishes, drinks and room: 4 Reels, 8 stills and the raw footage.

Restaurant Content: Content Day£1,450for the dayA full shift on site: a venue film, 6 Reels, 12 stills, Stories and captions, the kitchen included.

Restaurant Content: Monthly Retainer£950a monthTwo visits a month: 6 Reels, 10 stills, Stories and captions, and a monthly review.

What a destination can learn from the missing bus

Velena Nikolova with two family members on a muddy lane in winter in the Cotswolds — The walk we took when the buses were not running.

The best day of the trip began with a problem. We had planned Oxford on the 26th, and there were no buses. For a destination, there are two lessons in that.

The first is that honesty works. Viewers trust a travel film more when something goes wrong and the creator shows how they made the best of it. The walk to Over Norton, in the mud and the cold, is more persuasive about the Cotswolds than any drone shot, because it is real.

The second is that visitors need the practical facts, and a destination that publishes them clearly wins the trust a hiccup can lose. These are the facts we would have wanted, checked for October 2026:

Chipping Norton has no railway station. The nearest stations are Kingham, Charlbury and Ascott-under-Wychwood, as Wikipedia lists them.
The Stagecoach S3 runs between Oxford railway station and Chipping Norton through Woodstock, about once an hour, and the journey takes about an hour, according to the current timetable on bustimes.org.
Bus services over Christmas are usually reduced, and on some days there may be none, so check the operator's Christmas timetable before you plan a day out. We learned this the hard way.
The town sits in the Cotswolds National Landscape, the new name since 22 November 2023 for what used to be the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the largest National Landscape in England and Wales, as Wikipedia records.

A tourism body or a group of businesses in a town like this could turn those facts into a short, friendly video: how to get here without a car, what runs at Christmas, which walk to take if your plans fall through. That kind of content gets saved, because it is useful, and it is cheap to make once a creator is already filming the place. Our travel content packages are built for destinations, and our guide to destination Reels shows the structure we use.

The pinnacles of the Bodleian Library in Oxford against a grey sky — The Bodleian on 27 December: outside shots like this need no permission.

Oxford, on the last day, showed the other side of filming a destination: the rules. The Bodleian lets visitors take photographs for personal, non-commercial use, but it does not allow video cameras, flash or tripods, including selfie sticks, inside its buildings, and photography is not allowed in the Radcliffe Camera at all, according to its visitor page. To go inside the Old Library you need to book a tour. Our footage there was all from outside, which is why the picture above shows the pinnacles rather than the reading rooms. Any commercial shoot inside a building like this needs the venue's permission, arranged well ahead.

The Turf Tavern, where we had lunch, makes the same point in a gentler way. It is a historic pub at the end of a narrow alley near the Bridge of Sighs, owned by Greene King and dating back to the end of the 18th century, according to Wikipedia. A place with that much story behind it hardly needs a script, but a creator filming there for a brand should still ask the pub first.

How to brief a creator for a festive stay

If this page has made you want something similar for your own property or town, these are the points we would put in the brief. They come from what worked on this trip and from what we wish we had planned.

Pick the dates for the season you are sellingFilm over the real season, with the decorations up, and plan to post most of it the following year, before people book. Say in the brief which year's bookings the content is for.

Name the one featureTell the creator what guests remember: the bath, the fire, the view, the pub downstairs. It should open the main video and appear in most of the short ones.

Ask for moments, not only roomsList the moments you want: arriving, the table, a walk, a meal out, a quiet evening. Rooms will be in all of them anyway.

Clear the permissionsCheck where filming is allowed nearby. Inside a museum, a library or another business, a commercial shoot needs that venue's yes, arranged in advance.

Agree the labelsIf the stay or anything else is given for free, the creator's posts must be labelled as advertising. The CMA's guidance says labels such as "#gifted" on their own are not clear enough, and "ad" should be used instead.

Agree who owns whatDecide whether you can run the footage as paid adverts, for how long, and whether you get the raw files. Put it in writing before anyone travels.

The labelling point catches many properties out. The UK government's guide for influencers, written with the Competition and Markets Authority, says that posts about gifts must be labelled, that tagging a brand or using a discount code is not enough, and that terms like "#gifted" should be avoided in favour of a clear label such as "ad" (GOV.UK and CMA guidance). Our guide to the UK advertising rules for social media goes through it in full.

If you commission us, the brief is the first thing we agree, and nothing is filmed until it is. The people who plan your content are the people who film it, so the brief does not get lost between a planner and a crew.

A good brief also says what you do not want. For a festive stay that might be no shots of the bins, no guest cars on the drive, no mention of a hot tub that is closed for the winter. It is much easier to agree these things before a shoot than to cut around them afterwards, and a creator who knows them will frame the property at its best without being asked twice.

Packages for a hotel, a cottage or a destination

For a property, our hotel packages fit a hotel, an inn with rooms or a holiday let alike. Each is built around a long property film, with Reels cut from the same footage, and the property covers the stay rather than a production invoice that grows afterwards. Compare them in full on the hotel content packages page.

Hotel Content: The Property Film£1,950for the shootA 10 to 15 minute property film, 6 Reels from the same footage, 10 stills and the B-roll. One night on site.

Hotel Content: Film and Campaign£3,200for the shootA 15 to 20 minute property film, 10 Reels, 15 stills, Stories and captions, with paid media rights.

Hotel Content: Seasonal Campaign£4,800for the shootA 20 to 30 minute film built around a season, such as Christmas, with 14 Reels and 20 stills.

Hotel Content: Monthly Retainer£1,800a monthA monthly visit with an overnight stay: 8 Reels, 10 stills, Stories and captions every month.

Selling a whole town or region?Our three travel packages are made for destinations, with every price on the page.

See the travel packages

For a Christmas campaign like the one on this page, the Hotel Content: Seasonal Campaign is the closest fit, because it is built around one season and gives enough Reels to post through the months people book. For a smaller holiday let, the Hotel Content: The Property Film covers the main film and the short cuts from one night. If you would rather have someone plan and post every month, our social media plans for venues do that, and the hospitality content creator page explains how a shoot day works.

Before you book anything, two of our free tools are worth a look. The best time to post tool helps you plan when your Christmas posts go out, and the UTM link builder lets you see which posts actually send people to your booking page.

Christmas content for hotels and cottages: questions

Was this trip a commissioned shoot?

No. We booked the cottage ourselves through Airbnb and filmed the trip for our own travel channel. We share it as an example of what a stay looks like on camera, and of what we would make for a property that commissions us.

When should a hotel or cottage film its Christmas content?

During the real season, with the decorations up, and ideally a year before you need it. People book Christmas well in advance, so footage filmed this December does its best work from late summer next year.

What should a festive shot list include?

The arrival, the table, the people, one standout feature, the place outside and a meal out. Rooms appear in all of these, so you rarely need a separate room tour.

Can a creator film inside places like the Bodleian Library?

Not without permission. The Bodleian allows personal, non-commercial photography but no video cameras, flash or tripods inside, and no photography in the Radcliffe Camera. A commercial shoot needs the venue's agreement in advance.

Does a free stay have to be labelled as an advert?

Yes, if the creator posts about it. The UK government and CMA guidance says gifts must be labelled, and that "#gifted" alone is not clear enough. Use a clear label such as "ad".

How do I get to Chipping Norton without a car?

Take a train or coach to Oxford, then the Stagecoach S3 bus, which runs about once an hour and takes about an hour. Check the Christmas timetable, because services are often reduced or missing over the holiday.

Which of your packages suits a Christmas campaign?

For one property, the Hotel Content: Seasonal Campaign, which is built around a season. For a smaller holiday let, the Hotel Content: The Property Film. For a whole town or region, one of our travel packages.

Can we use the footage as paid adverts?

That depends on the package. Several of our hotel and travel packages include paid media rights; each product page says exactly what you can do with the footage and for how long.

References

A question this article did not answer? Ask our team, and a person will reply.

Velena NikolovaCo-Founder and Creative DirectorVelena co-founded Velena Lifestyle and leads its creative work, from social media content to hotel and travel films. Her work has been featured in Women's Health. She writes about what makes a place work on camera. Velena and Dragos both guest lecture at the University of Greenwich on social media and content strategy, and are invited back several times a year.