Not Updating Your Holiday Hours Is Sending Customers to Your Competitors

You’re closing for the holiday, and you make sure to tell everyone you thought you needed to. A sign on the door mentions this two weeks in advance, a post on Facebook and Instagram alerts your followers, and you make a friendly mention to any regular who comes in that week.

That should do it, you thought. You can now close worry-free without anyone wondering where you went.

Somebody did, though, and unfortunately, it was somebody new…exactly the kind of customer you don’t want to lose.

Because there was one place you did not update, and it is the place most people actually check before they leave the house: your Google Business Profile.

The short answer

Your Google Business Profile keeps showing your regular hours on a public holiday unless you set Special hours for that exact date. Google will not guess your closure for you. After all, that’s what Special hours are for: it’s what you need to proactively update for every holiday and early close you know about (while confirming the holidays you are staying open for too).

Does Google show my business as open on public holidays automatically?

In effect, yes!

Your regular weekly hours are what customers see on a public holiday, because that is the only schedule your profile actually has. Special hours are separate, and until you add one for that date, the holiday is just another Wednesday as far as your Google Maps listing is concerned.

Now, we agree that this feels backwards. After all, Google knows the date, right? It certainly knows when Songkran is. And yet for some reason, it shows your regular hours anyway, because they are the only thing you ever told it.

To be fair, Google does nudge you. Its own guidance says it is a good idea to confirm your hours for official holidays, even when nothing is changing, and it will sometimes offer you an upcoming date to review.

But if nobody does anything when nudged…nothing changes.

And how often do you open your Business Profile in the week before a long weekend? Probably not at all!

What is the difference between regular hours and Special hours?

Special hours are a dated override for one specific day. Your regular hours are the normal weekly schedule underneath: open ten to eight, closed Mondays. If a specific date happens to be covered by both the Special and regular hours, the Special hours are prioritized, and are what customers see. The regular ones will come back into visibility once the period noted for Special hours is over.

Regular hours are the pattern you probably set up once when you first created your listing, and proceeded to forget about. They repeat forever unless you go in and change them again.

Special hours are, well, special. It’s what lets you quickly jump in to note a few changes in your opening hours, or to say you’re closed entirely. So maybe for Songkran, you’re off April 13th, as well as the morning of April 14th, but you’re open after 1pm. With Special hours, you can set it that precisely.  

But here’s something that some businesses can get wrong: regular hours. The fact that they often stay untouched is a big deal because the most common reason a shop shows wrong hours is that somebody edited the regular hours for, say, New Year’s Eve, and forgot to ever change them back.

That’s why we highly recommend you use Special hours, as it’s just not possible to mess up like that. The “Special hours” really are special, and only last for as long as you choose. Eventually, the change to your open hours will always expire by itself.

What about “More hours”? Is that the same thing?

No. More hours cover services running on their own schedule inside your opening times, like delivery until midnight or a kitchen that closes before the bar. They are not tied to a date, so they will not close you for a holiday.

What does a wasted trip actually cost you?

Thai has a single word for this that English needs a whole sentence to explain: เสียเที่ยว. A wasted trip, or a journey you made for nothing.

It’s a terrible feeling: say somebody looks you up on a public holiday. Your profile says open until eight, so they go. That’s maybe twenty minutes on the BTS, or forty minutes in holiday traffic and an expensive Grab fare. They arrive, excited!...only to see your store is pitch black, the lights out and the door locked.

And worst of all, when this happens, they’re not calling you. There is nothing to call about, and nothing you could do if they did. So they look at their phone and search again for what they needed.

And the next result is open. Maybe 200 meters away, maybe somewhere they would never have tried. They go, it is fine, and now they know it exists. The fact is, you didn’t just lose one visit, but in a roundabout way introduced a customer to a competitor.

Worse still is the version you do hear about. Somebody writes “said open on Google, closed when I got there,” throws you a 1-star review, and who can blame them? They aren’t wrong, so there is no case for having it taken down. The holiday lasted a day. The review sits there for years, visible to anyone checking your profile.

Can wrong holiday hours actually hurt my Google ranking?

Yes, but in the intangible form of losing “trust” from search engines and other platforms. Platforms like Google decide how prominently to show you partly on whether your information looks reliable. A listing customers keep correcting does NOT look reliable!

If you read our piece on how inconsistent business info costs you customers, the three signals will be familiar: relevance, distance and prominence. The accuracy of your opening hours is related to prominence, and since it’s something you have control over, you really should work to maintain it as best you can.

And don’t forget: anyone using Google Maps can suggest an edit to your hours, and customers who have just found you closed do exactly that. Some go further and report the place as permanently closed. One report won’t really do anything, but if it keeps up, and a pattern is established, eventually Google will basically be forced to consider two versions of your hours: yours, and the one coming from upset would-be customers standing outside your closed door.

This matters more every year. With more and more people asking an AI assistant what is open near them right now on a holiday, it has to name a small handful of businesses. These assistants will assuredly refer to Google’s knowledge about you, and if Google says your store’s hours aren’t really reliable, chances are it’ll point the asking customer to another business.

So what do you actually change?

You should be adding an exception on top of your typical opening hours, which is a different setting in a different place: Special hours, under Edit profile, then Hours.

What if I have more than one branch?

Google supports setting special hours through a bulk upload spreadsheet! You can also explore listing management platforms and tools if you want to achieve this without the complexities of dealing with spreadsheets.

Why do holiday hours get forgotten every year?

It’s likely because no one is really forcing you to do so, and by the time it comes to mind, it’s often too late. That’s why we really recommend being proactive.

The task takes two minutes, and doesn’t have to be done one at a time. Go through your calendar, enter every public holiday and early close you already know about, and save future you a headache.

Sure, there will be instances where you’ll have to abruptly close and might forget, but a few slip-ups are far better than a year’s worth of holiday mess-ups.

To adhere to the best possible practices, you should get in the habit of reviewing your Google Business Profile’s overall status at the beginning/end of every week, or every other week if you haven’t got the time. Correct hours are just one of several details that can heavily impact whether people reach out to your business. There is another overlooked reason customers cannot find you on Google Maps worth keeping an eye out for, and it will need dedicated review time anyway!