Winter Hours and the Listing You Forgot

The seasonal change nobody propagates

Plenty of businesses change their hours in winter: closing earlier because it is dark, opening later, dropping a day, or reducing weekend trading.

The sign on the door gets changed, because that is where the change is visible to whoever made it.

The listing, the website, the voicemail, and three directories carry on stating the summer hours.

So for three months the most consulted source of information about your business is confidently wrong, and the people affected are the ones who checked before setting off.

Wrong in both directions

Both failures happen and they cost differently.

Showing you are open when you are closed sends somebody to a locked door, which produces a wasted journey, a poor review, and a customer who will not check again.

Showing you are closed when you are open is quieter and probably more expensive in total, because nobody tells you. They see closed, choose somewhere else, and you never learn it happened.

The second is the one that persists for months, since only the first generates a complaint.

Which is why this needs checking deliberately rather than waiting for somebody to mention it.

Regular hours or special hours

A distinction worth getting right, because it determines whether the change reverses itself.

Special hours are for individual dates: a holiday, a closure, a one-off. They apply on that date and revert automatically.

Regular hours are your standing pattern, and a seasonal change means editing those, which does not revert.

So a winter schedule is a regular hours change, and it will still be in place next June unless somebody puts it back.

That is the failure this article is about: not the change, but the reversion nobody diarised.

Everywhere the hours live

• The business listing, which most people check.
• The website footer and contact page.
• Other directories and industry listings.
• Social profiles, which carry an hours field.
• The voicemail message.
• The door, which is usually the only one done.
• Any booking system, which will otherwise offer unavailable slots.

The last is the one that produces an actual appointment at a time you are closed, which is worse than any of the others.

A worked example

A shop moved to a four-thirty close from November, changed the door sign, and told staff.

Their listing said five-thirty until somebody mentioned it in late January.

For nearly three months customers had been arriving between four-thirty and five-thirty to find the shop shut, and the owner had assumed the quiet end of the day was seasonal.

They corrected it, and then did the whole thing properly: hours updated in five places, a note in the calendar for the March reversion, and every public holiday for the following twelve months entered as special hours.

The following winter took fifteen minutes in total.

Their assessment was that the wasted journeys had probably cost more than any marketing they had run that year, and that nobody had told them about a single one.

Diarise the reversion

The step that prevents this being an annual problem.

When you change to winter hours, put a calendar entry on the date they should change back, with the summer hours written in the entry.

Do that in the same five minutes as the change itself, while you know what the old hours were.

Without it, the reversion depends on somebody noticing in spring, which usually means noticing in June.

The same applies to any temporary change: a reduced schedule during a refurbishment, a holiday period, or a staffing gap.

Do the holidays at the same time

Since you are already in the settings and November is the right month for it.

Enter every public holiday for the next twelve months as special hours, marking whether you are open or closed on each.

That includes the ones you are open for, because a listing showing normal hours on a holiday is ambiguous and one confirming you are open is a reason to choose you.

It is fifteen minutes and it removes the task from the year entirely, including the December ones that are otherwise done in a hurry on the day.

This is the single most valuable listing task available at this time of year.

Check it from outside

The verification step, which is quick and almost never done.

After changing anything, look at your listing signed out, from a private window, and read what it says.

Edits are reviewed before publishing and occasionally do not take, so the version you can see from inside your own account is not evidence of what customers see.

Do the same for the website and one directory, which takes another minute.

Then check again in early December when it matters most, since that is the month a wrong hour costs the most.

Tell people before you change

The half that is communication rather than settings, and it costs almost nothing.

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

A line in your email signature and on invoices during the fortnight before reaches everybody you are already dealing with.

And a sign in the window a week ahead reaches the people most likely to be caught out, who are your regulars rather than new customers.

Regulars are the ones who do not check, because they know what time you close, which is exactly why they arrive at half past five in December.

The counter-case

Not every business should publish precise hours at all.

A mobile trade with no premises has hours that mean when somebody answers the phone rather than when a door is open, and precision there is misleading.

For those, stating when calls are answered, plainly, is more honest than a schedule implying a place to visit.

There is also a case against changing hours seasonally at all, for businesses where the reduced period generates little and the confusion costs more than the staffing saved.

Where you do change them, change them everywhere on the same afternoon, and put the reversion in the calendar before you close the tab.

The fifteen minutes

1. Update regular hours on the listing.
2. Update the website, directories and social profiles.
3. Change the voicemail.
4. Check any booking system matches.
5. Diarise the reversion date with the old hours in it.
6. Enter twelve months of holidays as special hours.
7. Check the listing signed out afterwards.

Step five is what stops this happening again, and it takes thirty seconds while you still remember what the summer hours were.

Holiday hours specifically are covered in opening hours that change for a long weekend.

Frequently asked questions

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