Turning up to a closed business is one of the most reliable ways to generate a bad review, and it happens almost entirely because the hours listed online were wrong. It is a small administrative task with an outsized consequence.
Holiday opening hours cause the most trouble because they are exceptions, and exceptions are exactly what an annual routine forgets.
Hours live in more places than you remember
The Business Profile is the one most people check and it is rarely the only one. Hours also appear in your site footer, on a contact page, in structured data, on directory listings, on social profiles, on delivery platforms and in an answering machine message nobody has re-recorded since last year.
Make the list once, write it down, and work through it each time. The list is the useful artefact, because the task recurs several times a year and reconstructing it every time is how places get missed.
Use special hours rather than editing the regular ones
Business profiles support setting hours for specific dates in advance. That is meaningfully better than editing the standard hours, because it reverts automatically and it lets you set the whole year in one sitting.
- Set every known closure for the year at once, including bank holidays you do work.
- Set them as closed rather than leaving them blank, which reads as unknown.
- Where hours are shortened rather than closed, say the actual times.
- Do it a few weeks ahead, so the information is there while people are planning.
Marking the days you are open when people expect you to be closed is worth as much as marking the closures. A business open on a bank holiday when competitors are not has an advantage that only works if it is visible.
The reviews that come from this are brutal and completely avoidable. Somebody drove across town on the strength of what your listing said.
Nadia Ahmed, Local Marketing Manager, Presseo
Say what happens while you are closed
Closed is the fact. What the customer needs to know is what to do in the meantime: when you reopen, whether messages are monitored, and what to do if something is urgent.
A short note covering those three, on the site and in your automatic replies, converts an irritating dead end into a manageable wait. It also stops people phoning repeatedly and concluding you have gone out of business.
Do not promise monitoring you will not do
Saying emails are checked periodically over a holiday, and then not checking them, is worse than saying nothing. If nobody is looking, say so plainly and give a reopening date; people are entirely reasonable about a stated closure and unreasonable about being ignored.
Longer closures need more care
A closure of several weeks, for refurbishment or a seasonal break, deserves its own page explaining what is happening and when you return. It gives you something to link every notice to and it answers the question before anyone has to ask it.
Resist marking the listing as permanently closed for a temporary break, which is difficult to reverse and can affect visibility long after you reopen. Temporary closure is a distinct setting and it is the correct one.
Plan the reopening too
Hours need putting back, the notice needs removing, and the backlog of messages needs working through in the order they arrived rather than newest first.
A brief message to customers on the day you reopen is a cheap and effective way to restart bookings, particularly for businesses where people have been waiting for you. It also catches anyone who tried while you were closed and gave up quietly. The local SEO hub covers how listing accuracy affects visibility more broadly.
Build it into an annual routine
The reason holiday opening hours go wrong is that nobody owns the task. Put every known closure into the calendar at the start of the year with a reminder a fortnight ahead, assigned to a named person.
Handled that way the whole thing takes twenty minutes annually. Handled reactively it is a scramble several times a year and it is the scramble that produces the missed listing.
Check it from outside afterwards
After updating, search for your business the way a customer would and look at what actually shows. Closures and special hours occasionally fail to save, and the only way to know is to look at the public result rather than the settings page.
Closing over a holiday?
We will make sure your hours are right everywhere customers check, before they turn up.
