Interview: Holiday Extras share their Black Friday predictions

What does your business do, and what would you say makes it an exciting company/brand?

Holiday Extras is the UK's market leader for travel extras - with airport hotels, airport parking, airport lounges, airports by rail and coach, destination car hire and holiday insurance as its core offerings. Arrangements for seven million travellers are made every year, with over 90% of these bookings coming from the website. Innovative technology, a wide choice of products, unbeatable prices and making travel better for its customers are the focus for Holiday Extras. We are also the Official short break provider for Merlin Entertainments Group, offering customers short breaks away at some of the UK’s biggest attractions, including LEGOLAND Windsor Resort & Alton Towers Resort. We also fulfil the short break branch of the Ambassador Theatre Group’s London shows as well as powering Encore Tickets’ short break solution.

Holiday Extras is an exciting Company to work for as the opportunities contained within are so varied. It’s a Company that really cares about the people; both internally in terms of employees and externally with our customers.

What do you think of global retail events like Black Friday? Are they a positive thing for your business or do they make your job harder?

Black Friday is an exciting time of the year for Holiday Extras. As well as having our own in-house Customer Experience Teams (Call Centres), we are a heavily tech-focused business and therefore are very present online. Global retail events give us the opportunity to reach out to customers that we may not otherwise get the opportunity to engage with.

What did you learn from Black Friday 2017 and how has that been implemented in your 2018 plans?

A big take away from Black Friday 2017 was that there is a lot of ‘noise’ on Black Friday weekend and Cyber Monday. Everybody is trying to push their product out over this weekend and with company’s competing with who can offer the greatest discount, it creates a very competitive trading period. As a result of this, we will be arranging our campaigns around Black Friday weekend rather than directly during this period, with a core focus on pre-Black Friday to try and make the most out of the build-up to the biggest online retail weekend of the year.

What value can affiliates contribute to an advertiser’s objectives during Black Friday?

Affiliates are a huge help to Advertisers during the Black Friday period. Many of them are very experienced in Marketing in general, so they are a great support when it comes to co-ordinating campaigns. They also help us to push our product out in front of audiences that may not have seen our product in the past. In their area, they are the experts, so with huge online retail events such as Black Friday, I am very open to being ‘led’ by the affiliate on when and where our product is best pushed via their channel. This, of course, only comes once you have an established, trusted, tried & tested relationship with these affiliates. However, as a summary, affiliates are brilliant partners to have during this period.

How do you think Black Friday and the wider Cyber Weekend are evolving? What do you think these events will look like in the future?

I think Amazon have set the trend with ‘Amazon Prime Day’. I think that as time goes on, larger corporations will look to launch their own ‘Black Fridays’, outside of the actual Black Friday day to drive bespoke traffic to their products. It might even be a case that more advertisers try to ride on the coat-tails of Amazon Prime Day and put more focus on this, rather than Black Friday.

From an advertiser perspective, I envisage that more and more advertisers will look to push their products around Cyber Weekend rather than directly throughout Cyber Weekend. This could ultimately spell the end of Cyber Weekend as we know it if advertisers begin to put their time and effort into the build-up and comedown of Cyber Weekend. 

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