A customer checks your opening times, sets off and finds a locked door. Your team may have planned the closure weeks ago, but that plan has not reached the places customers use to decide whether to visit.
Holiday hours need a small, joined-up update: the right setting on Google Business Profile, clear information on your website and a check of what customers actually see. Start before the break, while someone is available to resolve a pending edit.
This is useful for Christmas and New Year, bank holidays, staff training and other changes to your normal week. The aim is simple: customers should know when they can visit, collect an order or reach your team.
Start with the hours customers can actually use
Agree the schedule with the person running the location before changing anything online. Separate public opening hours from staff working hours, telephone cover, collection times and appointment availability.
For example, a showroom might close to visitors while its team continues answering enquiries. Putting the team’s working hours into the showroom listing would give customers the wrong expectation.
Google’s business representation guidelines say to provide regular customer-facing hours. They also say that businesses operating only by appointment should not provide opening hours. Do not add a public timetable simply because the editor offers that field.
For each location, write down the affected dates, the service available on each date, opening and closing times, and the first normal day afterwards. Include ordinary weekdays affected by your break, rather than checking only named holidays. Give one person responsibility for approving this schedule.
Choose the setting that matches the change
Main hours: your normal weekly pattern
Main hours describe a normal week. If your business permanently changes its Saturday opening time, update that weekly pattern. A single early finish should not become the new schedule for every Saturday.
Google’s opening-hours instructions explain how to set the days and times under Edit profile → Hours. They also support two opening periods on one day, so a regular lunch break can be represented without implying continuous access.
Special hours: exceptions on particular dates
For a one-off early close or a closure of up to six consecutive days, use Special hours. Google’s special-hours guide says this preserves regular hours, requires Open with main hours, and recommends confirming official holidays even when your usual times apply.
Temporarily closed: a longer shutdown
For a closure lasting more than seven days, an off-season closure or a closure with no known end date, Google’s closure guide directs businesses to Temporarily closed. Set this through the main Hours setting. A holiday break should not be marked permanently closed.
There is an exact seven-day edge case: checked on 10 October 2026, the special-hours guide says seven or more days should be temporarily closed, while the closure guide says to use special hours for seven days or fewer. The pages disagree. For exactly seven consecutive days, check the current guidance with Google Business Profile support before choosing the status.
If you mark a location temporarily closed, assign a reopening task to a named person. Include a public-profile check on the first day back; do not leave restoring the listing to whoever happens to notice.
More hours: a specific service timetable
More hours covers services such as collection, delivery and takeaway. Google says regular hours must be set first and that these service hours should generally sit within your primary hours.
A restaurant’s collection window and its dining hours answer different customer questions. Check every service timetable you use when planning a holiday change. Do not assume that updating the main hours has made every service display correct; inspect the customer view.
Enter the dates, then check what you saved
Use the approved schedule as your reference. For a short exception, follow this route:
- Open the correct Business Profile and select Edit profile → Hours.
- Edit Special hours and review a suggested date or add the required date.
- For a closed day, tick Closed. For an open day, enter its opening and closing times.
- Add another opening period where needed, then save.
Return to the saved dates and compare them with the approved schedule. Check the year, the location and the reopening day. A correctly entered time against the wrong date is still a customer-facing error.
For overnight trading, the special-hours guide limits each set to 24 hours and explains when to split it across dates. Check the following day’s entry too, because special hours replace that day’s normal hours.
If several people maintain different branches, have a second person compare each saved schedule with the location manager’s version. A short independent check is more useful than a broad confirmation that someone has updated Google.
Bring the website and booking journey into line
Treat the website as a separate update to verify. Check its contact page, location pages, footer and any page customers reach from the profile. If one branch has different hours, put the exception on that branch’s page rather than making a site-wide statement that could mislead visitors elsewhere.
Make the customer message specific: which dates change, which services are available and when normal opening resumes. A vague holiday notice leaves people working out whether it applies today.
Test the next step as well. If bookings are unavailable during the closure, try selecting an affected date. If online orders remain available but collection stops, check the collection options and confirmation message. If the team will reply after reopening, make that expectation clear beside the enquiry route.
Where your website already outputs local-business structured data, ask the developer to check its hours against the visible page. Google’s LocalBusiness documentation supports opening hours and date-bounded seasonal closures using validFrom and validThrough. It recommends validating markup and testing the page, and notes that recrawling can take several days.
Update the existing markup at its source. Adding a second, conflicting block to a page makes future maintenance harder. Record which website field or plugin controls the hours so the next change has a clear owner.
Saved does not always mean visible
After editing, check the profile as a customer in both Search and Maps. Look at the full hours information, not just the editor. Confirm the business name and address so you are checking the intended location.
Google’s edit-status guidance distinguishes accepted, pending and not-approved changes. It says reviews usually take up to ten minutes but can sometimes take up to 30 days. That is a reason to work ahead, not a promise that every hours update will appear immediately.
If the edit is pending, keep a record of the submission and its status. If it is not approved, investigate the reason and use the available appeal route where appropriate. Keep the website accurate while the profile issue is unresolved.
Recheck shortly before the changed dates and once the business reopens. Keep screenshots of the saved schedule and the public display with the date of each check. This gives your team something concrete to compare if a customer reports different information.
If the hours change back, investigate the source
Google can update Business Profile information using sources including user reports and licensed content. Its current guidance says certain suggested edits may require a response within four days; without a response, Google may publish them when supported by other public information, such as your website. Some policy-related updates can happen without prior review.
Give someone responsibility for those notifications. If hours revert, compare the public display, the profile editor and your website, then check any listing-management tool your team already uses. Establish which system submitted the latest change before repeatedly re-entering the same times.
For several locations, keep one approved schedule per branch and a short record of who updated each channel. After the break, remove expired website notices and confirm that the normal customer journey works again.
Make accurate hours part of your local search maintenance
A useful handover contains the approved dates, the setting chosen, the website changes, the edit status and the public checks. It should also name the person responsible for reopening and notifications.
Accurate hours are one practical part of maintaining your local search presence. They help customers act on the information they find without an avoidable wasted visit.
If your Google listing, website and booking tools tell customers different things, talk to BuzzBoost. We can help identify where the information is maintained and agree a practical update process before your next closure.
Featured image: AI-generated editorial artwork, not a photograph of a real BuzzBoost office, client or result.
