Opening Hours That Change for a Long Weekend

The most checked information you publish

Before a long weekend, a large number of people check whether local businesses are open, and they check on a phone at the point of deciding whether to drive somewhere.

What they see is your business listing, which shows open or closed based on the hours you set, in a coloured line at the top.

If those hours are wrong, that line is confidently wrong, and somebody either drives to a closed shop or does not drive to an open one.

Both outcomes cost a customer, and the second is invisible to you entirely.

The feature nobody uses

Business listings include a special hours field, separate from your regular weekly hours.

You set a date and either different hours or closed, and on that date it overrides the regular hours automatically and reverts the following day.

It is designed exactly for this and it is one of the least used fields in the whole product.

The reason is straightforward: it is not where you go to change your normal hours, and nobody thinks about a holiday until the week before, by which point the useful window has passed.

Do the whole year at once

The single change that makes this work.

Sit down once, list every public holiday in your region for the next twelve months, and enter each one as a special hours date.

That is fifteen minutes and it removes the task from your year entirely.

Include the ones you are open for as well as the ones you are closed for, because a listing that shows normal hours on a holiday is ambiguous, and a listing that explicitly confirms you are open that day is a reason to choose you over a competitor whose status is unclear.

Add anything else predictable while you are there: a summer shutdown, a stocktake day, a training closure.

Where else the hours live

• Your business listing, which is what most people see.
• Your website, usually the contact and footer.
• Other listings and directories.
• Social profiles, which carry an hours field.
• Your voicemail message.
• A sign on the door, if people visit.

Somebody will check two of these and believe whichever is more specific. Inconsistency between them is worse than being closed, because it looks like carelessness rather than a holiday.

Say it in more than one place

Beyond the hours field, the closure is worth stating where people read.

A post on your listing, using the event type with real dates, stays visible for the whole period rather than expiring after a week.

A line on the website, near the top rather than buried in a news section.

A line in your email signature during the fortnight before, which reaches everybody you are already corresponding with.

And on invoices and confirmations going out in the run-up, which is free and reaches exactly the people who might need you.

A worked example

A supplier closed for four days over a long weekend and updated their regular hours on the Friday morning to show closed.

They forgot to change them back until the following Wednesday.

For two full trading days their listing showed them as closed while they were open, staff sat in a quiet building, and nobody could explain the drop.

The following year they entered every holiday for twelve months as special hours in one sitting.

Nothing needed changing manually again, nothing needed changing back, and the problem did not recur.

The manager's observation was that the expensive part had never been the closure. It was the two days afterwards when they were open and appeared not to be.

The changing back problem

Worth separating because it is the more common and more expensive failure.

Editing your regular hours for a holiday requires somebody to remember to reverse it, on a specific day, when they are catching up on everything else.

That is the step that gets missed, and being wrongly shown as closed is considerably worse than being wrongly shown as open, because a customer who thinks you are closed does not phone to check.

The special hours field removes the failure entirely, since it reverts on its own.

If you take one thing from this, it is to stop editing regular hours for temporary changes.

Reduced hours are worth stating

A distinction that helps more than a closure notice.

Many businesses do not close entirely over a holiday period. They run a skeleton service, answer the phone but do not attend jobs, or open shorter hours.

Saying that specifically is more useful than either open or closed, and it is where a post on the listing does something the hours field cannot.

Somebody who knows you are answering calls until two, with emergency cover only afterwards, can plan around it. Somebody who sees closed assumes you are unreachable for four days.

For trades in particular, that difference is a meaningful amount of work.

The counter-case

There is a way of overdoing this that creates its own problem.

Setting elaborate special hours for minor variations, or entering them speculatively for dates you have not confirmed, produces a listing that is wrong in a different direction.

An hours field showing an unusual pattern with no explanation also invites the assumption that something is going on, particularly for a business people rely on.

And for a business with no premises and no fixed hours, where everything happens by appointment, precise hours are close to meaningless and a plain statement of when you answer the phone serves better.

Set what is true, set it in advance, and do not manufacture precision you do not have.

Once a year

1. List every public holiday for the next twelve months.
2. Enter each as special hours, open or closed.
3. Add shutdowns and known closures.
4. Never edit regular hours for a temporary change.
5. Check the website, directories and voicemail match.
6. Post the reduced hours as a listing event with real dates.
7. Add a line to your signature and invoices beforehand.

The whole thing is fifteen minutes once a year, and step four is what prevents the expensive version of this.

Hours drifting out of date generally are covered in opening hours nobody updated.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.