Black Friday also gives hotels the opportunity to generate additional demand with attractive offers.

At the same time, countless providers compete for the attention of potential guests. For Sunstar Hotels, with seven properties in Switzerland, the goal for 2025 was therefore clear: generate additional direct bookings and grow booking revenue through its own sales channel.But how can this be done efficiently, without relying solely on paid reach? Sunstar already had a guest database built up over many years. Through ReGuest, these contacts 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 a sense of familiarity with them. With a relevant offer and the right reason to get in touch, this can turn into a new booking.

The approach: three newsletters on three consecutive days, each with its own hook and its own reason to take a look at the Black Friday offer.

This was a deliberate decision. Three messages in quick succession can also lead to fatigue and unsubscribes. Instead of simple reminder emails, TourismusConsult therefore opted for a short campaign sequence with three different impulses.

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 the platform for guest communication, marketing, sales, guest experience and data.

ReGuest is based in Merano (South Tyrol) and is used by more than 3,860 hotels. ReGuest also works with marketing agencies and partners who support their hotel clients through the ReGuest Partner Program – just as TourismusConsult does for Sunstar Hotels.