As someone who works in digital marketing/eccomerce, I think it’s clear this year that most retailers/people who sell a product online (including flights), have been much more clever about Black Friday than in years past.

One of any online sellers main aims is to protect RRP, for various reasons (if I were BA, it would be to preserve the remains of my brand equity and stop people expecting lower prices more than anything else) and therefore more retailers this year have avoided straight discounting. I’ve noticed lots of BF deals incentivising consumers to trade up, join loyalty schemes/subscribe and save or trial new products, which means that the seller gets a longer term reward out of it as well.

Therefore from what I’ve seen of BA’s Black Friday (not that I had time to have a proper look yesterday), it is no surprise to see them incentivising higher cabins, booking for two people and bolting on car hire etc. There would be very little value in just discounting economy tickets that people would probably buy anyway, when all you would be doing is training people to expect lower fares and not exposing them to any of the better cabins or extra services.

Looking to the future, I would certainly expect to more online sellers to be moving away from straight discounting to being much more savvy about Black Friday,