The idea
Prize draws in the UK are a £1.3 billion industry. You can win houses. You can win supercars. You can win cash. What nobody had built was the bespoke luxury holiday as the prize: not a catalogue trip or a pre-packaged break, but a holiday designed entirely to the winner's brief, anywhere in the world, within a £20,000 budget.
Houses come with stamp duty and running costs. Supercars come with insurance and storage. A trip of a lifetime, designed around you, comes with nothing but the memory. That is the prize we wanted to offer.
The prize, in plain terms
Every Golden Passport winner receives a £20,000 gift voucher redeemable through our travel concierge partner, a licensed UK luxury travel agency. Within 48 hours of the draw closing, a personal travel designer calls the winner. The winner describes the trip they have always wanted. The designer builds it: destination, hotels, flights, experiences, transfers, the lot.
Anywhere in the world. Up to £20,000 in value. Booked through a licensed UK travel agency with full financial protection.
Delivering the prize as a voucher through a licensed travel concierge means the winner's trip is booked with the industry's standard consumer protections in place, including ATOL and ABTA cover where required by law. No operational risk falls on the winner. They get a personal concierge, for one trip, with £20,000 behind them.
Starting in the North East
Draw One launches in the North East of England. That is deliberate.
The North East is home. It is where this was built. It is also a region with an extraordinary charitable sector, with organisations doing remarkable work across disability, youth, mental health, community, hospice care and more. A region where a meaningful share of profits from every draw can make a genuine, measurable difference.
So the first draw is a North East story: regional press, North East charity partners, a North East winner. Once Draw One closes cleanly and we have built a track record of paying what we promised, we grow, first across other UK regions and in time nationally.
The charity consortium
A consortium of North East charities sits at the heart of every draw. We are in advanced conversations with several established North East organisations across disability, youth, community and hospice care.
Charity partners will be formally announced once Commercial Participation Agreements are signed. Every partner will be named on this site before Draw One opens.
How the money flows
Entry money goes into one pool. From that pool, in this order:
- The £20,000 prize is ring-fenced as soon as enough entries have been sold to cover it in full. We call this the prize guarantee.
- Payment processing, platform fees and direct operating costs are paid.
- A share of what remains goes to our charity consortium. A share pays for the business itself: marketing, staff and growth.
We publish the total raised for charity after every draw. Full accounts are filed with Companies House and publicly available. If you want to see where the money went, you will be able to.
Who is behind it
Oliver Barber is the founder. From the North East, and building this because he believes the category needs to exist, and because giving back to the region every draw means more than one grand gesture ever could.
The Golden Passport Ltd is a UK limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 17173453.
The rules, briefly
The Golden Passport is a prize draw, not a lottery. We operate under the Gambling Act 2005 with a genuine, equivalent free entry route, meaning anyone can enter without paying a penny, by post, with the same chance of winning as a paid entry. We follow the DCMS Voluntary Code of Good Practice for Prize Draw Operators.
You must be 18 or over and a UK resident to enter. Full terms and conditions, including how the free entry route works, are set out on the Terms and Conditions page.
Questions?
Email ollie@thegoldenpassport.co.uk. The founder replies personally.