November 4, 2021
Black Friday is the worst day of the year to run a tour promotion. I'll say it plainly: if you're a Caribbean operator discounting your December tours in late November, you are giving away your peak inventory at the exact moment when demand is highest. You are paying yourself less to deliver the same experience. And you are training the guests who find you that way to wait for the sale next year.
I understand why operators do it. Everyone else seems to be discounting, so it feels like you have to join in. But most of those operators are not running boat tours out of Simpson Bay in December. They are land-tour businesses in cold climates desperate to move product in a slow season. For them, a November discount makes sense. For us, it is the opposite of sense. December and January are not slow months in the Caribbean. They are the season. The Christmas Winds kick in, the cruise ships stack up in Philipsburg, the resorts are full, and guests are already in a spending mood. Your job in November is not to discount. It is to sell before everyone shows up.
I know a catamaran operator who decided one November to run a proper gift card push instead of his usual Black Friday discount. He set up online gift cards - dollar amounts, no expiry, redeemable for any tour - and pushed them to his email list in the first two weeks of November. By the time December started, he had locked in roughly $40,000 in future revenue, all pre-sold, all paid for. January was the calmest month of his career because a big chunk of his bookings were already confirmed before Christmas. Guests who received gift cards came back, booked their trips, and spent more on add-ons once they were on the boat.
Meanwhile, a competitor ran a Black Friday deal - 20% off December tours on Instagram. He filled some seats. In January he watched his bookings go quiet, because guests who had found him started waiting to see if there would be another sale. He had taught them that the price would drop if they were patient. Some of them were very patient.
Gift cards are not just a nice thing to offer. They are a pre-sell mechanism. Run them in November and you are locking in January bookings before you've left the dock on December 1st.
Push them the first two weeks of November, before the Black Friday noise starts. Price at face value - no discount. Someone shopping for a gift wants certainty, not a cheaper rate. A printable voucher for a sunset catamaran in St. Maarten beats a department store gift card every time. You capture the money in November, the recipient books in January, and your peak week is already partially sold before the season opens.
There is a version of a holiday promotion that costs you nothing in margin. You keep full price and layer something on top that feels special but costs almost nothing to deliver. Here are four that work:
The discounting patterns I see every December create problems that run well past January.
The Black Friday percent-off. You put 20% off December tours on Instagram. You get a few bookings from guests who were already going to book, plus some deal-hunters who will be back next November waiting for the sale again. You have permanently adjusted their price expectation.
The early-bird discount. Your most engaged guests - the ones motivated to book ahead - get your lowest price. Your last-minute guests, often the least price-sensitive, pay more. The incentive structure is backwards.
The last-minute panic discount. Open seats two days before Christmas, you drop the price to fill them. It works once. Now every guest who hears about it knows that holding out pays off. You filled the boat and trained the market.
I am not saying never run a promotion. I am saying that discounting during peak season is the one version that actively works against you. Value-adds, pre-sells, bundles, urgency without price cuts - those work with your margins instead of against them.
None of this requires much. You need a way to sell gift cards online - dollar amounts, printable, redeemable against any tour. You need an email list, even a small one, to push the November campaign. And you need a booking system that can handle deposits and hold date slots for pre-booking.
If you are on Junglebee, gift cards and deposit handling are built in. But the bigger point is not software. It is the decision to charge full price during peak season and compete on the experience, not the rate. That decision happens before you open any tool.
Charge more in December than you do in August. Or charge the same. But do not charge less. The demand is there, the guests have budgeted, the season is real. You are delivering the most valuable version of your product - Christmas week on a catamaran, New Year's Eve at anchor - and there is no version of this story where the right response to maximum demand is a lower price.
Add a bottle of champagne. Pre-sell January with November gift cards. Bundle two days for the guest who wants more. Those are your holiday promotions. They grow revenue instead of shrinking it, and they leave you in January with guests who paid full price and told their friends.
The operator who sold $40,000 in gift cards told me the best part wasn't the money. It was that by December 15th he already knew roughly what January looked like. That kind of calm is worth more than a few discounted seats.
