Black Friday is the biggest shopping weekend of the year — and the hospitality brands that prepare early are seeing the biggest wins. Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend has become a prime opportunity for hoteliers to boost direct bookings, strengthen loyalty, and fill their Q1 calendar before the year ends.

In 2024, Black Friday spending topped $10.8 billion, and Travel Tuesday is quickly becoming one of the top booking days of the year.

This playbook will help your hotel stand out in a crowded inbox, optimize your conversions, and turn short-term demand into long-term revenue. Area you ready? Let’s get started.

Personalize your campaigns for today’s guests

You know your guests best, but traveler behaviors are evolving fast. This year’s BFCM audience is more experience-driven than ever before, they value personalization, and they expect early access to deals. It’s important to understand who’s browsing your offerings and how they book so that you can tailor your campaigns to resonate with them and inspire them to ditch the OTAs and book direct.

Black Friday insights for 2025

Before you go crafting those Black Friday offers and discounts, you need to know this year’s shoppers and what they’re looking for if you want those promos to land. Here are a few insights to get you started:

• Early birds still reign supreme. More than 59% of shoppers start browsing before Black Friday, meaning you should plan to send teaser emails and early-access campaigns to appeal to them.
• Experience beats discounts. Remember to offer packages that add value to your guests, which will always beat out basic rate cuts. This is also important to remember when focusing on hotel upselling.
• Loyalty-first campaigns win the booking. Loyalty members are likely to spend 22.4% more and stay 28% longer than non-members, as explained in our guide on hotel customer loyalty.

Segment and personalize

While it’s important to have some context about this year’s Black Friday spenders, using the data you’ve collected from guests will take your campaigns from general to personal. And using that data starts where it always starts, with segmentation and personalization.

We’re talking about guest preferences or demographic data or stay data — can you leverage a guest’s lifetime spend, number of past stays, or if they travel with family? The more specific you can get with your segmentation, the better.

The goal for your Black Friday hotel marketing campaign (or any email campaign, for that matter) should be to present relevant, uniquely personalized, eye-catching offers that are valuable to guests. You wouldn’t want to send a discount for a family four-pack stay to one of your most loyal, yet single and childless guests, now would you?

Here is a well-segmented Black Friday email campaign example from The Stafford London, which generated 283 direct bookings. They targeted guests who had previously booked directly (not via OTA) and contacts from their general, travel, corporate, or food and beverage list.

Check it twice: Email deliverability matters

Imagine this: You’ve spent weeks perfecting your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Travel Tuesday campaigns. But your emails never reach your intended audience. Strong deliverability is the foundation of every high-performing BFCM campaign, so before you hit send, make sure your content, list hygiene, and tech setup are aligned.

Email marketing best practices

Whether a Black Friday campaign, a Cyber Monday campaign, or any other, your key email features need to be flawless.

Here’s what you want:

• Clear image and brand logo (with alt-text).
• Relevant and succinct headline that avoids using “Re:” and “Fwd” abbreviations.
• Obvious call-to-action. Maybe that’s a couple of CTA buttons.
• Contact details for your hotel. Feel free to include your hotel’s address and website link.
• Privacy compliance. You need that “unsubscribe” button!
• Optional: A place for social integration. Don’t hesitate to drop in the platform icons with links to your social profiles.

Whether that’s double-checking the character limit for your subject lines (and please no all-caps), or testing the links on the CTA buttons, it pays to have these things correct.

Email filters

Good deliverability means campaigns go to the right email address, land in the guest’s main inbox, and convey exactly what you want the guest to know. That’s why you can’t forget the big three email filters: “Stay recency”, “Exclude OTA domains”, and “No future stays”.

For Black Friday campaigns, don’t target people that haven’t stayed with you in the last two years and people who use an OTA domain in their email address. Otherwise, you have a higher risk of the recipient labeling your email as spam or not taking your brand seriously.

And be sure to exclude folks who have already booked a future stay at a higher rate! (You’ll avoid canceled bookings this way).

Design that drives clicks — and bookings

Email design matters — and it’s especially important during BFCM, when guests scroll fast and act even faster. That means you visuals need to stop their scroll and make it truly effortless to book. Clean layouts, festive accents, and mobile-first design create the instant clarity and emotional connection needed to drive direct bookings. A/B testing your designs as well as subject lines and CTAs is a great way to predict how these campaigns will perform when they’re ready for launch.

And as we noted above, those designs need to render clearly on both desktop and mobile, so you might want to test that too. (Psst, CTAs should be visible on the first scroll!) Don’t miss out on revenue because you didn’t verify every viewing type.

Here’s what we mean when we say “clearly defined CTAs.” See how well this “Book now” CTA stands out? AutoCamp went with a simple yet bold design to quickly capture the guest’s attention and show exactly where to navigate and book their stay.

Time your BFCM campaigns for maximum impact

Hoteliers across the world will be vying for inbox space between Black Friday and Travel Tuesday — and the competition is fierce. Making sure you have a strong send schedule in place will help ensure your campaigns reach your targeted guests before, during, and after the holiday rush.

The key lies in timing and automation, so launch your teaser emails early, give loyal guests first access to your offers, and keep the momentum going through Travel Tuesday. Remember, that’s the day your audience is still searching for deals and actively booking.

Automated campaigns are the way to go

You’ve crafted the best Black Friday emails; now it’s time to think about dates. Use urgency and microsegmentation to maximize your impact with pre-sale teasers, weekend reminders, and “last chance” sends on Travel Tuesday. Here’s why: Extending offers through Travel Tuesday keeps the shopping spree going. If you automate those sends, you’ll not only ease pressure on your marketing team, but you’ll rest assured knowing those campaigns will be delivered to the right guest at the right time.

And if you really want to drive those full-funnel conversions, consider testing offers and visual campaigns across your social platforms and even on your website. Guests can have many touchpoints before they finally book. Maybe it starts with that first Black Friday email, and then they browse your site. When they leave your website, they receive an automated email reminding them to book, and they do. So make sure you have set up website and cart abandonment campaigns to capture any leads that would otherwise fall through the cracks.

Make every Black Friday hotel marketing send count

Black Friday doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Remember that the hotels that win those coveted direct bookings are the ones that plan early, personalize meaningfully, and remain consistent through the full BFCM cycle. It’s best to send smart, automate wherever possible, and use your data to turn seasonal bookers into loyal guests. And remember, guests will notice the level of personalization you provide, and they will reward you for it.