Black Friday has long since made a name for itself in the hotel industry too. But how can attractive offers generate additional demand at a time when countless providers are competing for the attention of potential guests? In 2025, Sunstar Hotels, with seven properties in Switzerland, set out to find out.

The goal was clear: generate additional direct bookings and grow booking revenue through its own sales channel.

There is a reason this worked without relying solely on paid reach: Sunstar already had a guest database in ReGuest, built up over many years, through which contacts had regularly received newsletters. Until then, however, the focus had been on building the relationship with guests rather than on selling.

Black Friday was the moment to find out what this direct contact could deliver as a sales channel.

Together with Sunstar, TourismusConsult developed a campaign that relied not only on new reach, but on existing guest relationships. The reasoning: people who already know the hotel brand bring trust with them – the ideal starting point for turning a relevant offer and the right reason to get in touch into a new booking.

The approach: a short campaign sequence of three newsletters on three consecutive days. What made it special: each one offered its own hook and its own reason to take a closer look at the Black Friday offer, to avoid fatigue and unsubscribes.

Sunstar Hotels contributed its brand, its offer and its existing guest relationships. As external marketing partner, TourismusConsult was responsible for the campaign logic, designed and produced the newsletters, and then analysed the results. ReGuest provided the technological foundation: guest data, sending and sending statistics.

Thanks to the existing integration with onepagebooking.com, bookings could be attributed to individual mailings. This made it possible to measure not only how many people opened or clicked a message, but how much booking revenue it generated. A paid campaign ran on Meta in parallel, providing an additional point of comparison.

With just three newsletters, the Black Friday campaign generated around €87,000 in attributed booking revenue.

The campaign itself ran for only a few days. Stays could be booked for the period from October 2025 to October 2026, so the campaign activated direct bookings over a stay period far longer than the campaign itself.

Over the Black Friday weekend, the newsletters generated around three times as much revenue as the Meta campaign running in parallel, with no additional media budget for the email sends. Particularly noteworthy: the third email achieved the highest open rate and was also the day with the highest revenue.

The feared newsletter fatigue never materialised. The unsubscribe rate remained within the normal range and deliverability was virtually flawless. The impact also extended beyond the sending days: bookings attributable to the campaign kept coming in until mid-December.

TourismusConsult also placed the campaign in a cross-channel comparison, based on ReGuest sending statistics, Google Analytics 4 and the Meta ad account. Both revenue per session and the booking rate of the Black Friday sequence were more than double the average across the channels analysed. Over a twelve-month comparison, the newsletter channel generated more revenue overall than paid social, despite driving only a fraction of the website visits.

These figures are no substitute for careful interpretation: Meta and Google Analytics 4 use different attribution rules. The reported values can therefore be compared and put into context, but not simply added together.

For Sunstar, this made it clear how valuable a well-maintained guest database can be for direct sales.

The recipe for success was not a single tool or a single message, but the way everything worked together: Sunstar knew its guests, TourismusConsult developed and implemented the strategy, and ReGuest provided the technological foundation for outreach and measurability.

The Black Friday campaign shows that successful hotel marketing doesn’t necessarily have to start with buying ever more reach. Paid media remains an important part of the marketing mix. At the same time, it pays to reach out again to the people who already know a hotel, at the right time and with a relevant offer.

Sometimes the next revenue opportunity lies not in a new target group, but in an existing guest relationship.

Sunstar Hotels operates seven properties in Switzerland. TourismusConsult supports the hotel group with marketing strategy, campaign design, execution and analysis. ReGuest provides its central platform for guest communication, marketing, sales, guest experience and data.