Restaurants and hotels braced for Black Friday sales boom
Some 14.7m people are set to hit the high street from Friday culminating with ‘Cyber Monday’ when most workers will have received their last pay check of the year, according to figures from the Centre for Retail Research (CRR) and VoucherCodes.co.uk.
Hospitality businesses are expecting to see a surge in demand, with Hotels.com anticipating a 50 per cent rise in online searches compared to Black Friday last year.
In 2014 the site recorded a spike in searches for stays in York (up 167 per cent), Newcastle (150 per cent) and Bath (120 per cent), while interest in London rooms rose by 75 per cent during the flash sale period.
“The rising recognition of Black Friday as a global bargain shopping day is now very apparent," said Marieke Flament of the Hotels.com
"The effect this has on online travel sites is immense, with even more cut-price deals available for just 24 hours.
“The research we have carried out supports the expectation of a massive spike in shoppers searching out the best online travel deals come Friday 27 November.”
Restaurants are also offering dramatic discounts in a bid to cash in on the expected surge of footfall on the high street.
Strada is offering tired shoppers a chance to ‘escape the Black Friday madness’ with a special menu where all pizza, pasta and risotto will be £1.
Meanwhile American restaurant brand The Diner is ‘joining in the madness’ by up-scaling all beef burger orders to a double patty across its eight London locations.
Dirty Bones will be serving 1p cocktails between 4-5pm on a first come first served basis, while shoppers with over £50 of same day recipts will receive a free Espresso Martini at Hush, Mayfair.
A YouGov poll for VoucherCodes suggests that people who missed out on savings last year could be behind the predicted boom in sales. Around half of those aware of Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year reported that they did not participate last year.
Visa Europe has predicted that shoppers will spend a total of £1.9bn on its cards alone this year.
Kevin Jenkins, Visa Europe managing director for the UK and Ireland, said: "It will be a tale of two different golden hours on the day. On the high street, we'll see a huge lunchtime rush. Online, the commuter hour will see the highest levels of buying, confirming the growing number of people who think mobile first for shopping.
"Black Friday's growth is really coming online in particular - that's where this year's surge is going to come from. It's also firmly become the bigger brother to the more traditional Cyber Monday."
