Be the Mastermind of Your Black Friday Campaign!

It’s the time of year again when everyone is planning their Black Friday deals and hotels are being contacted by their market managers of every OTA to offer a steep discount for a campaign that used to last one day but has extended from Black Friday to Cyber Monday to Boxing Day and beyond. So why should you participate in one of these deals which will help OTAs get traffic and drive business away from your direct channels? And if you do believe there is value in the visibility, then how can you ensure there is also value in the guest who books?

First let’s tackle the why of it. The major OTAs are investing a lot of money to market these campaigns. They have marketing budgets far beyond what an independent hotel could ever dream of having. So if they will be driving traffic to specific landing pages, as an independent hotel, it makes sense to try to be on that page. Also, people who have been considering booking a trip and are waiting for the deal are likely to prioritize hotels in a destination that are offering a deal. Personally, when I am shopping on Prime Day, I am going to filter for Prime Day deals. There may be a cheaper option of a similar product without a deal, but if I am going to purchase something on Prime Day, it needs to have a Prime Day Deal. And I doubt that I am alone in this thinking. OTAs have also done an incredible amount of research on what tagging and merchandising works best on their users to drive traffic to your hotel. Promotion details aside, it just makes sense to participate in campaigns where the OTAs are investing.

Now, let’s talk about how you can make it worthwhile for you. Booking 30 rooms at a 50% discount on a one night stay in your high season isn’t a great outcome of this campaign. So how can we be sure that if we decide to take advantage of this marketing opportunity, we are getting the kind of business we want from it?

Consideration 1: You can put a minimum stay restriction on your promotion so that it only applies to stays of 2 nights for more. But if you are in a seasonal market that is in low season, you may want to capitalize on the opportunity to get those room nights booked, even if it is just for one night. So protect your high season dates by making sure you have restrictions in place. It’s all well and good to have automated restrictions, but if your system is waiting for demand triggers to turn on a length of stay restriction, it might be too late. If you aren’t watching your future dates with precision, turn on the minimum stay for now and readjust after the promotion ends. 

Consideration 2: Make sure the promotion is also available on your direct channel. You don’t want to send all your business to OTAs. You should also promote it through your own newsletter and marketing channels.

Consideration 3: Since it’s available everywhere, and since the discount required is steep, you may consider yielding your rates slightly to compensate. Now don’t go crazy here, travelers (and algorithms) aren’t stupid and they will know if you yield up 25% and offer a 25% discount. 

Consideration 4: Consider your room types. You don’t have to offer the discount on all room types, so long as your call-to-action price is affected by the campaign. That means that you can offer the 30% discount on superior room categories without applying it to your base room which will have a lower impact on your ADR than applying the promotion to all rooms.

Consideration 5: Consider adding a booking limit. You can also protect your ADR by limiting the number of rooms you sell at the campaign rate to 2 or 3. This way you can maximize your visibility with the promotion without giving away too many rooms at one time.

Consideration 6: Don’t shy away from implementing parallel promotions! You can join the campaigns multiple times with different restrictions on each or simply create promotions that match the book & stay dates of the campaign with terms that are more satisfactory to you.

To sum up, it is possible to plan your promotions within a campaign to ensure they meet your hotel’s needs. You can take advantage of the visibility the OTAs get without overlooking your own goals. If you want to know how to adjust your strategy in Rate Yield to adapt to these ad hoc campaigns, reach out today!

Rikki Cavanagh is the Director of Business Development at Rate Yield. Connect with Rikki on LinkedIn.

About Rate Yield

Rate Yield was created in 2019 by seasoned Revenue Management consultants with over 30 years of experience within the field. Rate Yield RMS was designed to adapt to small hotels, inns, and resorts as well as large hotels in city centers. With settings and thresholds that can be modified against a hotel’s unique market trends, Rate Yield makes it more accessible than ever to implement AI in revenue management strategies. With real-time insights, agile strategy development, modules for budgets and forecasts, as well as a tool for displacement analyses, Rate Yield provides a complete software that will help your hotel to yield more revenue, period! To learn more, visit us at www.rateyield.com