Black Friday is no longer a one‑day event. Year after year it has turned into a multi‑day campaign that reshapes purchase intent, a “dress rehearsal” that can even set the price you’ll later defend, impacting cancellations and your distribution mix.
NB: This is an article from mirai, one of our Expert Partners
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That’s why, measuring when the purchase happens and in which channel it materialises, is the foundation of profitability.
At Mirai, we typically analyse, together with our clients, both the direct channel and the rest of distributors, to design strategies that maximise direct sales and margin. With that lens, we studied Black Friday 2024 (20/11–03/12), crossing bookings by channel with daily and hourly granularity, cancellation rate, hotel typology, months of stay, marketing investment and ROAS, to understand what activates demand and how to capture it better in your own channel.
The impact of the campaign can be huge; just look at how our leading hotel chains grew their web sales versus the rest of the year during the last campaign. Are you really not going to seize the opportunity?
1. From Black Friday… to Fake Friday: rising interest
In recent years, Black Friday has stopped being a single sales day to become an extended campaign that can even start a week earlier. Google already identifies the “Fake Friday” phenomenon, the Friday before Black Friday, where search interest reaches up to 80% of Black Friday’s own volume, reflecting that users expect deals to start early.
Action. Traffic data confirms this trend: Friday no longer concentrates all the interest; instead it spreads more evenly across the week. Days like Monday 24, Cyber Monday (Monday 1) and even Travel Tuesday (Tuesday 2) show levels that are very comparable to Black Friday itself. Ultimately, the campaign has turned into a two‑week marathon, where anticipation and continuity matter more than one‑day impulse. Plan your campaign accordingly.
2. Daily sales by channel: increasingly spread across more days
Here we break down each channel’s total sales by day. As noted above, the campaign shows a highly distributed sales pattern without a single peak concentrated on Black Friday. When we analyse sales by channel, we see the direct channel spreading its strength across several key moments (Nov 25–26, Nov 29 and Dec 1–3), showing great consistency. Booking remains stable on the same days, while Expedia concentrates bookings in the preceding week. Overall, behaviour confirms that Black Friday is now an extended period, not a day, and that the direct channel can go head‑to‑head with OTAs. In LATAM we see a slightly higher weight on Friday 29 itself.
