Tips For Having A Successful Black Friday

As Black Friday draws near, it’s important you set goals for what you want to achieve as a property from this event. Don’t just do a special offer to be seen to do a deal!
Identify what your property’s needs are and ensure you don’t compromise your business, bearing in mind your consumers are savvy and cannot be fooled!

IDENTIFY THE TIME PERIOD YOU WANT TO SELL:

Black Friday offers are a great way of filling bedrooms during periods that would otherwise be empty.

Make a list of dates you want to protect from the sale (events, concerts, Saturday nights that would otherwise fill, Bank Holiday weekends)
Then work on a list of days of week or specific dates that you need to drive occupancy for.

Once you have identified when you want the offer to be available you can now start working on the offer itself.

MAKE SURE THE OFFER IS TRANSPARENT AND EASY TO BOOK:

The last thing you want is for there to any confusion about exactly what your offer entails, so try to keep the details and titles of the package as clear and straight forward as possible.

Some simple steps:

Make the Offer Name clear and concise: Black Friday Save 10%
Description of the offer: Make the opening line of the description explain the offer as briefly and as clearly as possible.
Remember! the likelihood is your competitors are also selling a Black Friday offer, so you want yours to be clear and simple to understand, with the minimum amount of steps required to proceed with the sale.

SET YOUR RESTRICTIONS CORRECTLY AND INFORM YOUR CUSTOMER WHAT’S NOT AVAILABLE!

Don’t try and trick the customer, tell them in the offer description what is not available.

If your offer is only going to be valid for a certain time period (Midweek, January and February) make sure that when your rate plan is set up that these steps are correctly applied. Check and Double Check.  

DON’T TRY TO FOOL THE CUSTOMER:

As with the transparency of the offer, don’t try and be too clever with your offering. Make sure that Terms & Conditions are clearly visible and easily understood. Leaving any kind of a grey area with booking dates or booking windows may lead to honouring a booking for a date that you didn’t intend to sell it for.

LOADING AVAILABILITY ON OTA’S:

While the main aim of any property is to direct traffic and bookings through your own website, we do have to acknowledge the power and volume of business provided by OTA’s. Depending on the offer you’re creating it might be worthwhile making it available on a number of your other channels as well, especially if it’s only going to be bookable for a short period of time!

If you have any questions or queries about whether Rate Wise is right for your business, contact our dedicated support team. We can answer any questions you might have about Yield Management, Software Solutions and Rate Forecasting.